Louisville women’s basketball coach Jeff Walz took the blame Friday after the Cardinals saw their big late lead evaporate en route to suffering a shock 61-59 loss to No. 7 seed Miami in the quarterfinals. of the ACC tournament in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Leading by 15 points with just 5:44 left, Louisville had a 99.9% chance of winning the game, according to ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (BPI), but Miami edged out the No. 2-ranked Cardinals 17-0. in the last five. minutes. To complete his furious run. The Destiny Harden Hurricanes sealed the victory with a spinning jump at the bell.
“I’m going to take the blame for that,” Walz said after losing Louisville in the semifinals for the first time since joining the ACC in 2015. You probably think you’re going to play a tournament, hopefully three games in three days, and we’ve lost all of our rhythm offensively. Then we got some really bad shots, we didn’t defend and we didn’t defend. What we needed to do to get them back in the game, we did.
“I will not blame these children. It’s my fault… As a coach, I learned a valuable lesson today.”
Louisville (25-4) was one of the top four in the third and final NCAA women’s basketball rankings, revealed Monday, along with Stanford, South Carolina and North Carolina State. But he could go down on a streak if Baylor has a deep run in the Big 12 this week at Kansas City, according to ESPN archery expert Charlie Cream.
The game was also the 10th time this season that a team has lost after entering the fourth quarter by at least 14 points, and Louisville is the only team to have been on the losing end of many of these games, according to stats and information. from ESPN. The Cardinals previously lost to NC State 68-59 in mid-January when they allowed the Wolfpack to erase their 16-point lead and outscored them 31-8 for fourth place.
“Unfortunately for our group, we haven’t quite figured it out yet, and since I don’t care about the score, the first possession of the game is just as important as the last possession of the game,” Walz said. “It’s a hard lesson to learn, but hopefully we can learn and make some quick adjustments because now you have a good week and a half to sit on this. And if this doesn’t settle in your gut and bothers you outside, I don’t know what to do for them.”
Goalkeeper Keanna Smith shared her coach’s frustration at letting another big lead slip away.
“That was horrible,” he said. “No doubt about it. This is the second time this has happened to us this year, and we have to learn from it and make changes.”
The Cardinals went 0-for-5 from the field and made five turns in the final five minutes of the game. Louisville had two key players, Hailey Van Leyth and Olivia Cochran, as Miami returned with less than five years to play. Four of Wales’ five starting players returned after Miami cut the deficit to eight with 3:25 remaining, although Van Leith remained for most of the final three minutes.
“It sucked,” Walz said. “She had bad makeup on outside, and that made it all work out.” “We don’t communicate.”
Harden scored 15 of his 27 in the Hurricanes’ 17-point losing series to push the Hurricanes, one of Karim’s “last four free teams,” to victory.
“Is it safe to say we’re out of the bubble?” Miami coach Katie Meyer said. “I really still know”, she was looking for a book to find out what happened. Did Destiny fight 14-0 alone? this is correct? fifteen? Beautiful.”
