TAMPA, Fla. – Locked in a close game for the first time in weeks, the Baylor University women’s basketball team never flinched.
Kalani Brown scored 22 points and Lauren Cox added 21 as the Lady Bears held off Final Four newcomer Oregon 72-67 Friday night to reach the national championship game for the first time since 2012.
The two-time title-winners earned their 28th straight victory, exerting themselves defensively down the stretch. Chloe Jackson delivered a tiebreaking layup with 39 seconds left, and Brown and Cox finished out the victory with free throws for the NCAA tournament’s overall No. 1 seed.
“The feeling is unreal,” Brown said.
Coach Kim Mulkey won national titles as a player and assistant coach at Louisiana Tech, and now Baylor (36-1) has a chance to win its third national title with her in charge, facing fellow No. 1 seed Notre Dame for the title on Sunday night. The Fighting Irish, the 2018 national champions, beat perennial contender Connecticut 81-76 in Friday’s second semifinal.
The 56-year-old Mulkey, in her 19th season at Baylor, said she never questioned how her team, which this season has played only a handful of games decided by fewer than 10 points, would respond when it fell behind 64-61 with just more than six minutes remaining against the Ducks.
During a timeout, Mulkey said Brown – one of two senior starters – looked at teammate Juicy Landrum and told the 5-foot-8 guard the Lady Bears were going to be just fine.
“There was nothing to draw up. No magical words,” Mulkey said. “Just go play.”
All-American Sabrina Ionescu led Oregon (33-5) with 18 points, but she didn’t score in the fourth quarter. She missed a layup that would have given her team the lead in the final minute, and the Ducks misfired on 12 of their last 13 shots.
“They played like champions today and deserve to move on,” Oregon coach Kelly Graves said of the Lady Bears.
“I’m really proud of our team, no question about it. We certainly belonged to be here,” Graves added. “We had our chances down the stretch. I just don’t know if we ever got our game going. We saw bits and pieces of it here and there. Credit them. A really good defensive team.”
Mulkey gave Ionescu a hug and talked to her for a few moments in the postgame handshake line. Ionescu shot 6-for-24, including 0-for-7 in the fourth quarter.
After Jackson’s layup, Cox made two free throws and Brown finished with a foul shot in the closing seconds.
Oregon was one of the best 3-point shooting teams in the nation this season, but the Ducks were just 12-of-32 from behind the arc and shot 36.8 percent overall against Baylor.
“I think this is just going to make us more hungry to get back to this stage,” Ionescu said.
The opening semifinal at sold-out Amalie Arena was billed as “old school” vs. “new school” – a matchup of contrasting styles, with Baylor hoping to exploit a size advantage inside with an imposing frontcourt of the 6-foot-7 Brown and 6-4 Cox, and Oregon looking to test the Lady Bears’ ability to defend on the perimeter.
Ionescu shrugged off a scoreless first quarter in which she attempted just two shots. She scored 12 points in the second quarter and gave Oregon a 34-33 halftime lead after making a long 3 while being bumped to the ground by Baylor’s DiDi Richards.
Ionescu sat on the floor and stared at Richards, whom she thought had fouled her on a shot she missed moments before, before climbing to her feet to make a free throw to finish a four-point play to put Oregon up at the break.
“Our practices prepare us for these moments,” Mulkey said after Baylor’s closest game since a 74-68 win at Texas on Feb. 4.
The Lady Bears, whose only loss was at Stanford in mid-December, trounced their first four opponents in the NCAA tournament by an average of just more than 38 points per game. In doing so, Baylor became just the third team since the field was expanded to 64 teams to win each of its games en route to the Final Four by 25-plus points.
Connecticut did it twice, in 2010 and 2013, and capped each of those seasons with a national championship.
Oregon was in the Final Four for the first time, finally breaking through under Graves after losing in the Elite Eight the past two years. Graves said the Ducks don’t take solace in playing the top overall seed down to the wire.
“No, it still hurts,” the coach said. “But we’ll have a chance to look back on this and realize that this was an incredible season. We’ve got a lot coming back. This is a team that’s going to be loaded. We’ve proven we’re a program on the rise. We’re not going anywhere.”