Iowa Women’s Basketball: Can the Hawkeyes Win a National Title?

The Iowa Hawkeye women are in a place they’ve only been once before. It’s been thirty years since the Hawks were last in the Final Four (longer for the men) and now Iowa has the opportunity of a literal lifetime. While just getting to this point is a massive accomplishment and something that is rightfully being celebrated across Hawkeye Nation, the question now is whether Iowa can keep this run alive.

The ultimate goal, of course, is not just a Final Four but a National Championship. It’s something neither the men’s nor women’s programs have done at Iowa in the school’s history and now Lisa Bluder, Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes are two wins away from even more history.

But national championships don’t just grow on trees. They’re hard to win. They’re even harder when you’re not a blueblood program, especially in a sport that has seen perhaps as little parity as just about any other major sport in the world. The best teams in women’s college hoops have amassed a massive talent pool with a gaping gap between the haves and the have nots.

The Hawkeyes have worked diligently under Bluder to close that gap over the last half decade and now find themselves on the precipice of history. Can they overcome the odds (literally) and make history? Yes! And No.

Why Iowa Won’t Win the National Championship

This is Iowa we’re talking about and a lifetime, nay multiple lifetimes of history have taught us to be skeptical and pessimistic. This should be no different. The easiest answer to “why can’t Iowa win the national title” is because this is Iowa. We never have and we never will. We can’t have nice things!

But more precisely, the athletics gods have all but deemed it impossible for Iowa to win the title this year. It’s incredibly unlikely they even get a shot at it. As things stand today, the Hawkeyes are 12-point underdogs to the South Carolina Gamecocks on Friday. And that would represent a GOOD showing by the Hawkeyes!

In South Carolina’s 36 games this season, the Gamecocks have yet to lose. They’re average margin of victory is 29.4 points per game. Just seven times all year has a team lost by fewer than the 12 points they’re favored by on Friday night. Only three times all season has a team kept it to single digits. All three of those were road games for SC, two were at top-5 opponents Stanford and UConn.

Not only are the Gamecocks the clear top team in the country, they’re a brutal matchup for Iowa. The Hawkeyes are built on pace, an efficient offense and scoring in droves. South Carolina is built on slowing things down, smothering defense and grinding out wins with second-chance points and big stops.

As noted by our own Bartt Pierce, the Gamecocks are long and athletic with four starters who would likely start in Iowa City alongside superstar Caitlin Clark. They can come at you in waves and often do with eight players averaging more than 15 minutes per came. They have absurd length with a pair of twin towers as Aliyah Boston measures in at 6’5” while Kamilla Cardosa is 6’7” (for reference, Iowa center Monika Czinano comes in at 6’3”)

And now they have a potential chip on their shoulder. While the aforementioned Boston was named Defensive Player of the Year and coach Dawn Staley was named Coach of the Year for the second straight season, Boston did not repeat as national Player of the Year as Iowa’s Caitlin Clark took home those honors this week. For a team that hasn’t lost before the Sweet Sixteen in a decade and is entering their third straight Final Four and looking to repeat as national champions, adding a reason to make things personal is not a recipe for success for opponents.

What’s more, Friday’s matchup is just the first of two games Iowa would need to win to take home a title. The prize for beating the absolute juggernaut that is South Carolina? Getting to face off with 1-seed Virginia Tech or 3-seed LSU - both of which present their own potential nightmares for the Hawkeyes, who would undoubtedly be emotionally and physically exhausted after a battle with the Gamecocks in the Final Four.

It just seems so impossible, especially for Iowa.

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