22:30 ET
Alexa PhilippouESPN
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- Covers women’s college basketball and the WNBA
- He previously covered UConn and the WNBA Connecticut Sun for Hartford Courant
- A Stanford graduate and born in Baltimore with additional experience in the Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times and Cincinnati Inquirer
Louisville women’s basketball coach Jeff Waltz took the blame on Friday after his Cardinals saw their significant lead evaporate on their way to a stunning 61-59 upheaval against No. 7 Miami in the ACC quarterfinals.
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 surpassed the No. 2 Cardinals 17-0 in the last five minutes to ended his furious rally. Hurricanes’ Destiny Harden sealed the victory with a buzzer reverse jumper.
“I’ll take the blame,” Waltz said after Louisville lost before the semifinals for the first time since joining the ACC in 2015. I tried to change a little bit at the end, trying to keep my feet fresh, you probably think. that you go through a tournament, three games for hopefully three days and we lost all our rhythm in attack. And then we made some really bad shots, we didn’t defend ourselves, we didn’t defend ourselves. Everything we needed to do to allow them back into the game, we did.
“I will not blame these children,” Waltz added. “It’s my fault … As a coach today, I learned a valuable lesson there.”
Louisville, 25-4, was one of the four most seeded in the third and final group of the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee on Monday, along with Stanford, South Carolina and North Carolina. But that could fall short if Baylor continues to fight in this week’s Big 12 tournament in Kansas City, according to ESPN bracelet Charlie Cream.
The game also marked the 10th time this season that the team lost after entering the fourth quarter with a lead of at least 14 points, and Louisville is the only team to have been at the losing end of many such matches, according to ESPN Stats & Information. The Cardinals previously lost to NC State 68-59 in mid-January when they allowed Wolfpack to erase its 16-point lead and overtake them 31-8 in the fourth.
“Unfortunately for our group, we still haven’t fully understood that I don’t care what the outcome is, the first mastery of the game is just as important as the last mastery of the game,” said Waltz. “This is a difficult lesson to learn, but I hope we will learn from it and make some quick adjustments, because you now have a good week and a half to do it. And if that doesn’t work in your gut and I make you angry, I don’t know what to do for them. “
Guardian Kiana Smith shared her coach’s disappointment that she had allowed another big lead to disappear.
“It was awful,” Smith said. “It simply came to our notice then. This is our second time this year and we need to learn from this and make changes. “
The Cardinals came out 0 for 5 from the field and allowed five turns in the last five minutes of the match. Walz made various lineup changes during this period, but regained four of his five starting positions after Miami reduced the deficit to eight by 3:25 before the game.
“I sucked. I had some bad combinations and it just threw everything away,” Waltz said. – We have not communicated.
Harden scored 15 of her 27 in a series of 17 unanswered Hurricanes to drive Hurricanes, one of Crem’s last four Chao teams, to victory.
“Can we say we’re out of the bubble?” Said Miami head coach Katie Meyer. “I really don’t know yet,” I said, looking for a book to find out what had happened. Did Destiny do a 14-0 run alone? Is it true? 15? Come on. “