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Geno Auriemma first stepped foot in Thompson-Boling Arena 29 years ago. He doesn’t recall much about that Jan. 6, 1996 meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, the third time in 12 months his UConn Huskies faced Pat Summitt’s Tennessee Lady Vols. But he remembers how electric the environment was, how there wasn’t an arena of that size, with that energy, on any other college campus in the country.
The matchup, a rematch of the 1995 title game that the Huskies had won, generated a fervor that only intensified in the years to come. As the Huskies and Lady Vols duked it out for women’s college basketball supremacy, combining for 12 national titles from 1995-2010, they built the sport’s fiercest rivalry, growing the game to new heights along the way.
But entering Thursday’s showdown between No. 5 UConn and No. 19 Tennessee (6:30 p.m. ET, ESPN), “rivalry” might not describe the series in 2025. Players on both sides are too young to remember what it once was: Paige Bueckers, the oldest player on either roster at 23, was 5 when the schools played for the final time with Summitt on the sidelines in 2007. The presumptive No. 1 overall pick in April’s WNBA draft, Bueckers said Tuesday that UConn-Notre Dame, which peaked in the 2010s, resonates more as a rivalry to her and her teammates.
Auriemma, whose clashes with Summitt were a crucial part of the rivalry, is effectively the only remnant of those legendary battles. And since the series was revived in 2020, he has gone out of his way to emphasize it isn’t what it once was — nor should it be.
“It became something that wasn’t normal,” he said Tuesday, referring to the acrimony that grew between the fanbases, coaches and programs. “It just became stupid and became something I didn’t want to be a part of anymore. I think our fans are stupid. I think their fans are stupid, and how they reacted to the whole thing, it just became something other than a basketball game, and after a while that just got old.”
Summitt’s…
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