Published: April 7, 2025
For nine years, UConn kept getting close without finishing it. They made Final Fours. They reached championship games. They lost players to the WNBA and reloaded. But the trophy kept going to someone else - South Carolina, LSU, Baylor, Stanford.
On April 6 in Tampa, the Huskies ended the drought.
UConn beat South Carolina 82-59 in the national championship game. The 23-point margin was the third-largest in women's title game history. Both of the bigger blowouts were also UConn wins, in 2013 and 2016.
Azzi Fudd was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player. Fudd had been battling injuries for much of her college career, missing significant time over multiple seasons. When healthy, she was one of the most talented shooters in the country. In the tournament, she was healthy - and dominant. She scored 24 points in the championship game and 19 in the semifinal rout of UCLA.
Paige Bueckers, UConn's biggest name, had scored 31 or more in three straight tournament games heading into the Final Four. Against UCLA in the semifinal, she scored 12 in what was a blowout from the second quarter on. She didn't need to do more. UConn beat the Bruins 85-51. Sarah Strong led that game with 22 points.
The championship matchup against South Carolina was a rematch of the 2022 title game, which the Gamecocks won. This time, UConn controlled the tempo from the start. The teams traded the lead early in the first quarter, but UConn closed the period on a run and never gave the lead back. By halftime, the Huskies were up 20. South Carolina never got closer than 15 in the second half.
South Carolina had entered the tournament as the defending champion. Dawn Staley's team won the SEC tournament and earned a 1-seed. They beat Tennessee Tech, Indiana, Maryland, and Duke to reach their fifth straight Final Four. Against Texas in the semifinal, they pulled away in the third quarter and won 74-57.
But against UConn, the Gamecocks couldn't generate consistent offense. Te-Hina Paopao scored the game's first points, but South Carolina shot poorly for most of the night. UConn's defense, which had been sharp all tournament, was suffocating in the second half.
The broader tournament was historically orderly. For the first time since the women's bracket expanded to 64 teams, no official upset occurred in the entire tournament. No team seeded 11th or lower won a first-round game. The Sweet 16 and Elite Eight played out almost exactly as the seeds predicted.
That predictability showed up in the bracket pools. One perfect women's bracket - "LisaVT22's Picks 1" on ESPN - survived through 57 games before falling in the Elite Eight when UCLA beat LSU. Out of roughly 5 million entries, that bracket outlasted every other submission and surpassed the 2024 record of 51 correct picks. The lack of upsets gave perfect brackets a much longer runway than usual.
The championship game drew 9.8 million viewers, making it the third most-watched women's title game in history. Viewership was up 75% compared to the 2022 UConn-South Carolina matchup. The women's tournament as a whole averaged its second-highest ratings on record, with 8.5 billion minutes viewed across ESPN platforms.
For Auriemma, the title was validation that UConn's program hadn't slipped - it had just been waiting for the right group to come together. Fudd's health, Bueckers's consistency, Strong's emergence, and the depth of the supporting cast all clicked at the right time.
Twelve titles. The most in the history of women's college basketball. And after nine years between championships, UConn made the wait feel like a footnote.
In short: UConn beat South Carolina 82-59 to win its 12th national championship, ending a nine-year title drought. Azzi Fudd was named MOP. The 2025 women's tournament produced zero official upsets for the first time ever, and one perfect bracket survived 57 games. The title game drew 9.8 million viewers.