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ESPN
Mar 30, 2024, 11:00 PM ET
ALBANY, N.Y.– When the 2024 ladies’s NCAA competition bracket came out 2 weeks earlier, all eyes went to Region 2 in Albany and the prospective Elite Eight face-off in between the groups that fulfilled for the championship game last season.
On Monday (7:15 p.m. ET, ESPN/ESPN App), that hit shows up, as No. 1 seed Iowa deals with third-seeded LSU for a journey to the ladies’s Final Four in Cleveland. The seeds state something, however history states another: LSU won the championship game video game 102-85 last April and most likely is viewed by lots of as the preferred in this rematch.
The Hawkeyes have Caitlin Clark, the nationwide gamer of the year last season who is anticipated to tidy up those honors this year, too. As a senior, she ended up being the all-time leading scorer in Division I guys’s or ladies’s basketball– she’s presently at 3,859 points– and drew sellout crowds not simply to Carver-Hawkeye Arena however at all however 2 regular-season roadway video games.
Clark is surrounded mainly by other sharpshooting guards, consisting of Kate Martin and Gabbie Marshall, her colleagues the previous 4 years. Iowa leads Division I in scoring, and if the Hawkeyes fume from behind the 3-point line, they are difficult to stop.
LSU leads Division I in getting to the nasty line and is the leading significant conference group in rebounding, too. The Tigers function double-double danger Angel Reese, in 2015’s most exceptional gamer at the Final Four, in addition to skilled guards such as Aneesah Morrow, Flau’jae Johnson and Mikaylah Williams.
The 2023 NCAA last drew nearly 10 million audiences– making it the most watched females’s basketball video game in tv history– on April 2 in 2015. On April 1, 2024, the Tigers and Hawkeyes will reunite. What should we anticipate? Which group will advance? ESPN’s Andrea Adelson, Katie Barnes and Michael Voepel take a look at this high-voltage match.
Reese and Clark are 2 of the greatest stars in college basketball. Will Clark’s boundary video game or Reese’s paint video game identify the winner?
Barnes: Perhaps the most wonderful part of this video game is that Reese and Clark play various positions, which opens the alternative for them both to control. In this circumstances, with the lineups the method they are, Reese will have the last word, although Clark will get hers to be sure.
Hannah Stuelke will likely get the call to secure Reese, however she quits size. Stuelke is 6-foot-2 and Reese is 6-3. An inch isn’t a big distinction, however Reese frequently needs to play larger than she is with much less space to maneuver (look no more than her matches with UCLA’s Lauren Betts and South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso).
Versus the Hawkeyes, Reese has the size benefit, so she’s going to go to work. Anticipate her to get her 27th double-double on the season– as long as she avoids of nasty difficulty– and have a dominant efficiency inside.
