King Kaufman's Sports Daily
"Long" wait is over: Tennessee pounds Rutgers for NCAA women's title. Plus: Coaching legend Eddie Robinson dies.
Read more: Sports, Basketball, Women's basketball, College Basketball, NCAA Tournament, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
April 4, 2007 | "Knoxville was due for a championship," Tennessee star Candace Parker said after leading the Lady Vols to their seventh NCAA women's basketball title in a 59-46 rout of upstart Rutgers. Leading up to the Final Four, she'd talked of ending Tennessee's title drought.
It had been nine years, and in the intervening seasons Tennessee had been to the Final Four five times and the Championship Game twice. Things are a little different in Knoxville when it comes to women's basketball, the bar's a little lower when it comes to declaring a drought.
It's been more than nine years for Rutgers, let's just say, which was after its first championship. It's also been more than nine years for the other Final Four teams, North Carolina, winners in 1994, and LSU, which has never won.
But there are people who believe the natural order of women's college basketball is for Tennessee to be at the top. Most of them wear orange a lot. Tuesday night in Cleveland it looked unfortunately like the team in red believed it too.
Rutgers, a 4-seed that shocked Duke early in the Tournament and put itself in position to become the lowest seed ever to win the title, looked terrible. The Scarlet Knights, a team without a senior, seemed to start thinking at just the wrong moment that maybe they didn't belong on the same floor with the game's most storied program, best player -- Parker -- and greatest coach, Pat Summitt.
The Scarlet Knights looked jittery and lost. Guard Epiphanny Prince, who knows better, dribbled into a triple team at one point, and at another, she puzzlingly refused to pick up a ball she'd fumbled, incorrectly thinking she'd be called for a travel. Her ultimately unsuccessful attempt to keep a Tennessee defender from the loose ball was a notable exception to Rutgers' apparent steadfast refusal to box out.
"Maybe we read the headlines or realized it was a National Championship Game," Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer said. "We looked like a deer stuck in the headlights."
Too bad, because the game was there for the taking early. Despite having every physical advantage there is to be had -- size, speed, quickness, strength -- and dominating the boards to a ridiculous degree, Tennessee let Rutgers stay in the game.
Tennessee got seven of the game's first eight rebounds, and 11 of the first 13. Of those 11, seven were offensive rebounds. At about that point, six and a half minutes into the game, Essence Carson of Rutgers hit a little jumper in the lane for an 8-6 lead.