For the past two years, the top two finishers in Big East women’s basketball could be penciled in before the season even began: UConn first, Creighton second.
But the Creighton team that the Huskies will face in Omaha, Neb., on Sunday looks completely different from the one that gave them their closest game of conference play in 2024-25. The Bluejays graduated four members of their starting lineup, all of whom spent their entire careers with the program and started at least two years. They returned just two players who averaged more than 10 minutes per game last season, and eight of 10 members of the active roster have less than two years of college basketball experience.
Creighton’s slow start to Big East play hasn’t been surprising but is still disappointing for a team that made the conference championship game last year and is just three seasons removed from an appearance in the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. The Bluejays have already dropped four conference games after losing just five in the last two regular seasons combined, and two of their three wins are against Butler and DePaul — the last-place teams in the league.
UConn coach Geno Auriemma said Creighton’s play style hasn’t changed significantly from previous years, but its biggest issue is its youth. The team’s two leading scorers are both freshmen, and on top of its other losses, senior guard Kiani Lockett was ruled out indefinitely with a knee injury after just four games.
“When you lose that, not just one or two but when you lose pretty much all of it, it is a rebuilding process of how do you get that many players now to fit together,” Auriemma said Saturday during a Zoom conference. “They don’t have the chemistry that their past three teams have had, but the concepts are still the same, and they get the same shots and they kind of approach things the exact same way. It’s just different people doing it at a different level right now, because it’s a whole new group.”
Creighton’s fall is part of a larger problem for the Big East: The conference finds itself increasingly irrelevant in the national landscape outside of UConn’s overwhelming dominance. While the Bluejays have had impressively strong player retention even amid their major rebuild, most of the conference is struggling to keep its best talent year over year in the era of NIL and the transfer portal.
“That’s what happens at a lot of programs in our league,” Auriemma said during his radio show Thursday. “A lot of these schools don’t have a lot of money in today’s world, and it’s all about money for some of these kids. … If there wasn’t a lot of money being offered or there wasn’t this idea that you have to be at a certain kind of school, you have to be at a Power 4 school, it’s made it hard for a lot of the teams in our league.”
UConn’s prestige has insulated it from the problems of the rest of the Big East, but the lack of any legitimate challenger in the conference impacts the Huskies, too. Auriemma always puts together a grueling nonconference slate, but several of the team’s marquee games this season are poised to be less competitive than expected.
USC, ranked No. 16 when it faced UConn in December, has fallen to No. 21 and sits on the verge of dropping from the AP poll after a loss to unranked Oregon on Tuesday. Notre Dame fell out of the top 25 for the first time since 2019 ahead of its Jan. 19 game in Storrs following a disastrous 0-2 start in ACC play. Tennessee, once poised to be a top-10 matchup for the Huskies, is also hovering in the bottom third of the rankings currently at No. 20.
The Bluejays are 0-12 all-time against UConn, but the team could always count on them to provide a quality — and often ranked — pair of Big East games every year. This season, it’s hard to see a scenario where the Huskies don’t add another blowout to their undefeated record Sunday. Creighton enters the matchup fresh off an 18-point loss to a Marquette squad that UConn beat by 36 on date, and the Huskies have an average margin of victory of 45.7 points in conference play through seven games.
But Auriemma isn’t worried about the Huskies’ resume down the stretch of the regular season. He’s satisfied with the progress his team is making even against lesser competition, and he knows from experience that the development will translate in March regardless of what polls or metrics say about the team’s strength of schedule.
“The record is the record. We played who we were supposed to play, and I would put my nonconference record against anybody in America’s,” Auriemma said. “We’ve played pretty much every kind of nonconference team that there is out there, that plays a lot of different styles. So I can’t predict what’s going to happen, but I feel pretty good about how we’ve reacted to that.”
UConn women’s basketball newcomers reaching new heights at midway point of season
How to watch
Site: CHI Health Center, Omaha, Neb.
Time/date: 2 p.m., Sunday
Team records: UConn 16-0 (7-0), Creighton 7-9 (3-4)
Series record: UConn leads 12-0
Last meeting: 70-50 UConn, March 10, 2025 at Mohegan Sun Arena
TV: truTV
Streaming: HBO Max
Radio: UConn Sports Network on FOX Sports 97.9
