Why UConn women's basketball will win 2025 NCAA Tournament

03/23/2025 05:06 PM

With a 69-point win over Arkansas State in the opening round, the UConn women’s basketball team advances to the NCAA Tournament Round of 32. After making the Final Four in 2024, Geno Auriemma, Paige Bueckers and the Huskies look to bring the school its first national championship since 2016.

For most schools, nine years is not a long time since its last national title. For UConn, it is the longest the Huskies have gone since Auriemma’s first championship with the team in 1995. They have made it back to the Final Four six times since 2016 but have only returned to the National Championship Game once in the last nine years.

In 2025, UConn enters the NCAA women’s basketball tournament as the No. 2 seed in the ‘Regional 4.’ Led by No. 1 seed USC, the region is arguably the toughest in the tournament. To make it back to the Final Four, the Huskies will likely have to beat Oklahoma and USC in successive games. While daunting, Bueckers led UConn to a win over USC in the 2024 Elite Eight.

Even as the lower seed, UConn is still the betting favorite to make it out of Regional 4 over USC. With veteran leadership and one of the best coaches in women’s basketball history, the Huskies have never strayed far from their next title, even as it continues to elude Bueckers. The path back to the top will not come easy, but UConn has as good of a chance to win the 2025 NCAA Tournament as they have in the last decade.

Paige Bueckers’ last shot at NCAA Tournament National Championship

In her five years at UConn, a national title is the one accomplishment that has evaded Paige Bueckers. In her final year as a Husky, Bueckers has lived up to all of her other lofty expectations but has yet to bring the esteemed program back to the promise land. Bueckers, who could have declared for the 2024 WNBA Draft, returned to Storrs for one reason.

Before the Caitlin Clark and JuJu Watkins craze took over the women’s college basketball world, Bueckers was considered arguably the best women’s basketball recruit of all time. Her high school success had her going viral on social media years before she even committed to the Huskies. Clark’s dominance, paired with UConn’s astonishingly loaded history, has some believing Bueckers failed to reach expectations. Yet, in a nutshell, a national title would put her career up with any other in the sport’s history.

For Bueckers, winning has always been the goal, regardless of what level. She is already a virtual lock to go No. 1 in the 2025 WNBA Draft and would have been a top-five pick in 2024. Personally, she has almost nothing left to prove at the college level. Bueckers just feels like she went to UConn for a purpose and does not want to leave without achieving it.

UConn women’s basketball role players

It is not just Bueckers with UConn. The team will go where she takes them, but they are as well-rounded of a team as any in college basketball. Years of insanely talented rosters have fans spoiled, but this Huskies team has more than enough chemistry and cohesion to go the distance.

The 2025 NCAA women’s tournament is not without a shortage of star power. Hannah Hidalgo, Hailey Van Lith, Flau’jae Johnson, Watkins and others easily join Bueckers on the list of names fans will tune in for. However, few teams get as much production from their role players as UConn does.

On any given day, any one of UConn’s top six players could lead the team to victory. In the first round, it was Azzi Fudd, who led them with 27 points, seven assists and six rebounds. Freshman center Sarah Strong led them in scoring 12 times in the regular season, the second-most on the team. Bueckers is their leader, particularly in crunch time, but the Huskies are far from a one-dimensional team.

To beat a team like USC in the Elite Eight, UConn will need the type of production from its role players they have received all year. When the two teams met early in the year, Strong dominated the smaller Trojans in the paint with 22 points, 13 rebounds, five assists, four steals and one block. Should both teams take care of business and set up a rematch, she could be the X-factor that leads the Huskies back to the Final Four.

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