Six wins away: How UConn is closing in on 13th NCAA title, seventh perfect season

With a rainbow of confetti on the shoulders of his dark blue jacket, UConn Huskies women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma was in March mode. As his players danced and celebrated around him, he explained the perils of perpetual success.

“There’s pressure everywhere you turn,” Auriemma said after the Huskies’ 90-51 victory over Villanova in the Big East tournament final Monday in Uncasville, Connecticut. “It’s never as easy as it’s sometimes looked.”

The UConn women have collected conference championships the way the trophy cases of their league counterparts have collected dust. This Big East title was UConn’s 31st conference tournament crown and 12th in a row, and it came on the Huskies’ 50th consecutive victory.

National championships haven’t quite come like clockwork, but UConn also has a record 12 of them. Now the Huskies are six victories away from their 13th NCAA title and seventh perfect season.

National championships are the standard in Storrs. The Huskies don’t cut down nets for conference tournaments or even regional victories that clinch a spot in the Final Four. Monday at Mohegan Sun Arena, the players turned their championship hats upside down to collect the confetti. But it was relatively low key.

“Our work isn’t done yet,” senior guard Azzi Fudd said.

UConn won the NCAA title with a 37-3 record last season. And despite losing 2025 WNBA Rookie of the Year Paige Bueckers, these 34-0 Huskies led by Sarah Strong and Fudd might be even better.

But not if you ask the coach who has won every UConn championship.

“I don’t know how you can take one of the top players in the WNBA off your team and say you’re better,” Auriemma said. “Because there are a lot of times when I watch us play and I say, ‘That wouldn’t have happened if we have Paige.’

“Now that doesn’t mean they’re not capable of playing at a real high level that matches what that team did last year.”

If the Huskies repeat as national champions, they will have a better record than last season’s team. How have these Huskies done it?

Strong came into this season as the nation’s best player

Strong was the top recruit from the class of 2024. The daughter of former Harvard star and WNBA player Allison Feaster, Strong entered college with an already deep understanding of what it takes to be successful. The latest in a decades-long line of stars with high expectations to enter UConn, Strong has lived up to her billing. She averaged 16.4 points, 8.9 rebounds, 3.6 assists and shot 58.6% from the field while starting all 40 games as a freshman.

In the 2025 Final Four, Strong had a combined 46 points and 23 rebounds, leading UConn in both categories in victories against UCLA and South Carolina. She shot 67.9% from the field in those games, and Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley said after losing 82-59 in the final that Strong might end up being the best UConn player of all time.

Strong’s first Final Four last season felt like the coronation of the next UConn superstar and set the stage for her taking over this season.

The 6-foot-2 forward, who was named Big East Player of the Year and tournament Most Outstanding Player, is averaging 18.5 points, 7.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 3.4 steals while shooting 60.1% from the field and 42.7% on 3-pointers. She is the kind of multidimensional standout that the WNBA covets and would be the No. 1 draft pick if she were eligible this year.

Fudd has come into her own

Fudd is projected to be the No. 1 pick in the 2026 WNBA draft. The senior guard has been through an injury odyssey but now has put together two consecutive mostly healthy seasons. Though Fudd sat out six games early in the 2024-25 season, she has played in every game this season. Without Bueckers as the primary go-to guard, Fudd has stepped into that role and soared.

Fudd played 42 games over her first three years at UConn — one was a redshirt season after only two games — and 68 the past two. This season, she is averaging career highs in points (17.7), assists (3.0), steals (2.5), field goal percentage (48.9) and 3-point percentage (44.6).

Only one UConn game this season was decided by single digits — a 72-69 victory over Michigan on Nov. 21 — and Fudd led the way with a season-high 31 points. Fudd isn’t a duplicate of Bueckers — she has her own style and strengths — but she is an elite, experienced, confident veteran who knows how the players go together to win a championship and where she fits in.

“How grateful I am to be part of this program,” Fudd said Monday of her emotions about winning this title. “Fortunate to have had that confetti fall on me five times here, whether I was playing or not playing. Also, seeing people going through it for the first time.”

The Huskies have reliable and productive depth

Strong, Fudd, forward Serah Williams and guards Ashlynn Shade and KK Arnold have started almost every game together this season. Shade and Arnold are juniors and Williams a senior transfer from Wisconsin. That’s a lot of basketball experience. But Williams added a different kind of hunger because this type of success is new to her. Wisconsin hasn’t been to the NCAA tournament since 2010.

This season, Williams has absorbed how to be ready for the biggest games that lie ahead. “It’s still challenging,” said Williams, who is averaging 7.2 points and 4.4 rebounds. “I came here to put myself in an uncomfortable position, to be able to get as much as I can out of collegiate basketball. I really do love this team and what I’ve been learning from everyone.”

Blanca Quiñonez, a 6-2 freshman forward, is averaging 9.9 points. Sophomore guard Allie Ziebell has more than doubled her playing time from her first season; she is averaging 7.9 points and joins Strong and Fudd in shooting better than 40% from 3-point range (43.2). Ziebell made 10 of 14 3-pointers against Xavier on Jan. 28.

Kayleigh Heckel, a sophomore transfer from USC, also has fit well into UConn’s rotation at guard.

“We have a few more players that we can trust to put on the court,” Auriemma said, comparing this season’s depth to last season. “We have a different way of playing. We have different options.”

The competition hasn’t been as competitive

This is no slight against the Huskies, who have proved over the past 30-plus years that they can win NCAA titles regardless of their schedule. But the three teams that beat UConn last season — nonconference opponents USC, Notre Dame and Tennessee — have struggled more this season and lost 2026 rematches with the Huskies in blowouts.

USC superstar JuJu Watkins, the reigning national Player of the Year, is sitting out this season because of a knee injury suffered last March. Tennessee has lost 10 of its past 12 games. Notre Dame had a strong finish, reaching the ACC tournament semifinals, but still has double-digit losses for only the third time since 2008.

The Huskies have dominated conference play for a long time. They won their first eight national championships while in the “old” Big East Conference. In 2013, they went to the American Conference, in which they never lost a league game in seven seasons. During that stretch, UConn won three more NCAA titles. UConn returned to the reformed Big East in 2020-21 and won its 12th NCAA title last year.

A 14-point win over Villanova on Feb. 18 was the Huskies’ closest conference game this season. In the regular season and league tournament combined, UConn won its 23 games against Big East foes by an average of 41.9 points.

Again, a perfect record is a perfect record. But so far the Huskies haven’t faced quite the challengers this season as they did last season.

The UConn machine keeps grinding

Since UConn won its first NCAA title in 1995, there has never been a “rebuilding” period. It has been sustained success, no matter how much talent is lost to graduation or injuries.

Admittedly, both of those things — plus the elevation of other programs — have had an impact in determining whether UConn got all the way to the national championship. The Huskies didn’t win a title between 2016 and 2025, which was their 12th. (There was no NCAA tournament in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.) But no amount of adversity has kept the Huskies from being contenders every season for three decades.

They are seeking their 25th Final Four, an event they’ve fallen short of only once since 2007. That was in 2023, a season that Bueckers sat out because of a knee injury. They returned to the Final Four with Bueckers back in 2024 and 2025.

The Huskies won as a No. 2 seed a year ago. Now they’re the clear favorite and the expected No. 1 overall seed heading into March Madness, a spot the Huskies are more familiar with than any other program. Bueckers won’t be on the court, but every other part of what makes the Huskies the sport’s premier power will be.

“The best team usually wins the national championship, but not always,” Auriemma said. “It’s the team who comes together at the right time. We’ve got a great group. We can do a lot of different things, and our defense has been really, really good all season long. If we stay in that mindset, then we’ll have a chance, just like we want to do every year. We just want a chance.”

And even in his 41st season at UConn, Auriemma says he still relishes the process and the players who make it happen.

“As you get older, you get a little more patient and appreciative of your life and you enjoy it more,” he said. “Or you get older and get a little more cranky. I’ve had just enough crankiness this year. But because of the way they are, they kind of make it hard for you to stay cranky and stay agitated with them, because they enjoy what they do. They just have an incredible chemistry together, and that makes it all work.”

ESPN’s Alexa Philippou contributed to this report.