Baylor Makes Its Talking Points

For nearly two years, Baylor basketball has been known more for the shooting death of men’s player Patrick Dennehy -- allegedly by a teammate -- than success on the court. And the good citizens of Waco, Texas, have been desperate for something else to talk about.

On Tuesday night, the Baylor women’s team gave Waco, and the rest of the country, a refreshingly different subject to discuss.

A national championship.

The Bears were too much for Michigan State, routing the Spartans, 84-62, for the NCAA women’s basketball title in front of 28,937 at the RCA Dome.

Baylor got 26 points and nine rebounds from All-American forward Sophia Young, 22 points from front-court partner Steffanie Blackmon, 19 points off the bench from Emily Niemann and a brilliant coaching job from Kim Mulkey-Robertson. On Tuesday the Bears rolled to their 20th consecutive victory, the nation’s longest active streak.

The Spartans (33-4) got 20 points from Lindsay Bowen and 17 from Kristen Haynie but were never really in this one. The Bears beat them significantly in every key phase from rebounding (45 to 22), to shooting (49.2% to 41.5%), to passing (17 assists to nine assists).

“I thought their zone would present some problems for us,” Mulkey-Robertson said. “I knew I had people who could shoot the perimeter shot. But we weren’t going to let it become a perimeter game. You got to get post touches, guys. That’s the key to breaking down a zone. You’ve got to do what got you here, and the post game got us here.”

Michigan State Coach Joanne P. McCallie who, like Mulkey-Robertson, was coaching in her first Final Four, said her team simply didn’t play well.

“There’s a lot of things we didn’t do,” McCallie said. “But I hate to sit up here as a coach and talk about what we didn’t do. Baylor played super, we played average, and you can’t really do that at this level.”

Baylor is the first Big 12 Conference team to win the NCAA title. When Texas and Texas Tech won their national championships, they were part of the Southwest Conference.

Baylor is also the first team to win the championship in its first Final Four appearance since Notre Dame in 1991

Mulkey-Robertson is also the first woman to win a national championship as a player and a coach.

Teams tend to shoot better in a dome in their second game. That definitely applied to Baylor in the first half. When Niemann wasn’t making shots from the outside (five three-point baskets, 15 points), Blackmon and Young were getting free for layups or short jump shots.

“When Emily hit that first shot I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, she’s on,’ you know,” said Young, who was named the most outstanding player of the Final Four. “She knocked down those two big [early] threes for us, and that just gave us a lot of momentum into the game.”

Meanwhile Michigan State was as cold as could be, falling behind, 32-13, with 3:12 left in the first half before showing some signs of life.

A 10-0 spurt whittled the Bears’ lead to 32-23 with 1:11 left, but Baylor pushed to a 37-25 advantage by halftime. And you had to wonder whether Michigan State, which had rallied from large deficits against USC, Vanderbilt and Tennessee in the tournament, had any magic remaining.

So did Mulkey-Robertson.

“I reminded them [at halftime] that Tennessee had a 16-point lead with 14 minutes left in the semifinal game and they beat them,” Mulkey-Robertson said. “I reminded them again at the eight-minute mark, when we had a double-digit lead, that this game wasn’t over. It’s just the way I coach. I never let them get comfortable.”

Her players got the message, and never let Michigan State get comfortable either, continuing to make jump shots and leading by as many as 23 points in the second half. And they hardly gave Michigan State, which had only three offensive rebounds, an extra shot.

“We were a step slow,” McCallie said. “Nobody was moving tonight like they could move. That was a big problem against a nice, athletic team like Baylor.”

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Winners All Around

NCAA Division I basketball champion coaches who also won titles as players:

*--* As a player As a coach Dean Smith Kansas, 1952 North Carolina, 1982, ’93 Bob Knight Ohio State, 1960 Indiana, 1976, ‘81, ’87 Kim Mulkey-Robertson Louisiana Tech, 1981 *, Baylor, 2005 ’82

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* AIAW Division I champion, before the NCAA governance of women’s sports