Season like no other could catapult UConn to most improbable of NCAA women’s basketball title runs

MINNEAPOLIS — UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma sat at the dais in the media room in Atlanta’s McCamish Pavilion, arms crossed, voice subdued and his typical charisma replaced with something unheard of for the 11-time national championship coach: helplessness and feeling defeated.

Auriemma’s Huskies had just fallen to Georgia Tech 57-44, their first loss to an unranked team in nearly a decade. They were two weeks into losing top 2021 recruit Azzi Fudd to a foot issue and four days removed from 2020-21 national player of the year Paige Bueckers going down with a knee injury that would sideline her for nearly three months. Adding salt to the wounds, Nika Muhl was ruled out the day before the game with a foot injury of her own.

Knowing they’d be short three guards for the foreseeable future was tough enough to stomach; but the way UConn played — an anemic offensive outing that produced just five points in the fourth quarter — was a far cry from what Auriemma and the rest of the basketball world had been accustomed to seeing from the Huskies over the past three decades. UConn players never emerged for postgame interviews despite always doing so following tough losses in years past, and what Auriemma said afterward was just as startling as the performance itself.

“What I see is a team that’s somewhat disheveled. And that’s all me,” Auriemma said. “Somehow, someway, I do not have the ability at this point in time to affect my players to make sure that we’re in a better place mentally and physically and play the kind of basketball we need to play.”

“I don’t think it’s gonna get fixed. I really don’t.”

If you would have told Auriemma that night his Huskies would get…