Michigan women crumbles in fourth quarter in 81-72 NCAA tournament loss to Kansas
Death, taxes and Michigan women’s basketball winning a first-round NCAA tournament game? Not so fast.
The Wolverines couldn't hold onto a 10-point fourth-quarter lead as they failed to advance in March Madness for the first time in seven tries under head coach Kim Barnes Arico. Zakiyah Franklin hit a tying 3 with 12 seconds left for Kansas and the Jayhawks scored the first five points of overtime in ninth-seeded KU's 81-72 win over the eighth-seeded Wolverines.
U-M senior Cameron Williams matched her second-best total of the season with 18 points on 7-for-13 shooting before fouling out in OT, and the Wolverines limited the All-Big 12 duo of senior center Taiyanna Jackson and freshman guard S’Mya Nichols to a combined 19 points on 5-for-15 shooting in regulation. Jackson and Nichols took over in OT, however, with 10 of KU's 14 points. U-M guard Laila Phelia rebounded from a slow start to finish with 16 points, three rebounds and four assists.
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But in the clutch, U-M struggled to run its offense and KU got basket after basket from Franklin, who finished with a team-high 22 points on 9-for-16 shooting.
Kansas will face the winner of Saturday’s late game between 1-seed Southern Cal and 16-seed Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in a second-round game Monday in L.A., with the time and TV to be announced. The winner of that game will head up the West Coast for the Sweet 16 in Portland, Oregon, next weekend. An win by KU would send the Jayhawks to the second weekend of the tournament for the first time since 2013.
Go fourth and prosper
After building a game-high 10 point lead on a Chyra Evans layup with 6:07 remaining, U-M’s offense went quiet for the next 2½ minutes as Kansas answered with a 9-2 run to pull within three points. That was capped by a Wyvette Mayberry 3-pointer with 3:59 remaining, but U-M's Elissa Brett brought it back to a six-point lead with a 3 of her own 22 seconds later.
But the Jayhawks kept coming, aided by some disjointed offensive sets in the final minutes by the Wolverines. After Jackson hit a layup to make it a three-point game again, Phelia was called for an offensive foul giving KU the ball with 75 seconds remaining. The Jayhawks made the most of it, with Franklin hitting the tying 3 with 12 seconds left.
Cam-do attitude
In a game expected to be dominated by 6-foot-6 KU center Taiyanna Jackson, a Chicago-area native, it was instead the 6-3 Williams, also from the Chicago area, taking charge in the paint. After missing her first three shots in the first quarter, Williams hit two of four shots in the second, then poured it on in the third: 4-for-5, all within 6 feet of the basket. Jackson, meanwhile, had just two makes — all in the third quarter after going 0-for-2 in the first and going without an attempt in the second.
A slow start
The two squads, befitting an 8/9 matchup, spent much of the first quarter trading possessions — though not necessarily baskets — in a back-and-forth run. The Wolverines struggled to find their shots, hitting just four of 15 attempts, and just two of nine inside the paint, from the floor over the first 10 minutes.
But U-M rediscovered its offensive balance in the second quarter, hitting seven of 13 shots overall — three 3s on five tries (with one make apiece from Brett, Lauren Hansen and Jordan Hobbs — and four 2s in the paint. Unfortunately for Michigan, the Jayhawks found their flow as well, with Mayberry — who was averaging 9.6 points a game entering the tourney — accounting for eight points over the first five minutes of the frame. That included a layup to give KU a six-point lead at the 5-minute mark. But Michigan responded with an 8-0 run — an Evans layup, followed by Hobbs’ and Brett’s 3s — to leap into the lead with 3:35 remaining.
Contact Ryan Ford at rford@freepress.com. Follow him on X (which used to be Twitter, y’know?) @theford.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan women collapse in 4Q in OT March Madness loss to Kansas
