Drew

This is why Dawn Staley will never be a true legend. It's all Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton and whatever is best for Dawn Staley. Of course her players can't win the big one... their coach is too worried about her brand to actually care about what UCLA is doing. Again, Dawn Staley wore a $2,300 Balenciaga jacket to the national championship game tonight. No South Carolina logo. No team colors. No Gamecocks branding anywhere on her. Her team lost 79-51. That jacket tells you more than the score does. Staley is a decent enough coach. Three national championships. A perfect 38-0 season in 2024. Five National Coach of the Year awards. The highest-paid women's basketball coach in the country at $4.25 million a year. But somewhere along the way, Dawn Staley the coach became Dawn Staley the brand. Her fans call her "Louis Vuitton Dawn." She wore Gucci for the first round this year. Balenciaga for the second. Gucci again for the Sweet 16. Louis Vuitton for the Final Four. There are entire articles dedicated to ranking her outfits by round. WWD tracks her sideline looks. Essence runs features on her style. She published a memoir last year called "Uncommon Favor" that became a New York Times bestseller. None of that is a crime. She's allowed to be all of those things. But tonight she stood on the sideline in a luxury brand's name while her team put up the worst title-game performance in program history. South Carolina shot 29% from the field. 2-for-15 from three. Their starters went 8-for-31. Joyce Edwards, their leading scorer, was held to 3-for-10 for eight points. UCLA outscored South Carolina 25-9 in the third quarter. That's the largest single-quarter margin in championship game history. By the end of that quarter it was 61-32. South Carolina averages 86.5 points per game. They scored 51. That's 35 points below their own standard in the biggest game of the year. Meanwhile, Gabriela Jaquez had 21 points, 10 rebounds, and five assists. Only the fifth player in history to put up a 20-10-5 in a title game. Lauren Betts had 14 and 11. UCLA's six seniors scored every single one of their 79 points. Cori Close won her first national championship in her 15th year at UCLA. She wasn't trending for what she was wearing. The full story on how Dawn Staley's brand showed up and her coaching didn't is here: itsgame7.com/news/dawn-stal… Two days ago, Staley beat UConn 62-48 in the Final Four. She looked every bit the championship coach. Geno Auriemma melted down so badly that assistants had to separate them near the scorer's table. Two days later, her team came out flat against UCLA, fell behind early, never adjusted, and got run off the floor by a team that wanted it more. The third-largest margin of victory in title game history. The Balenciaga jacket didn't cause the loss. UCLA was better. Their defense suffocated South Carolina. Their size inside was a problem the Gamecocks never solved. But when you show up to a national championship game wearing somebody else's name instead of your school's, and your team looks like they forgot whose name they were supposed to be playing for too, the image sticks. She's still rich and famous. Good for her. But tonight, the brand showed up and the coaching didn't.

This angle of the steal is CRAZY 🤯 #MarchMadness