CRAWFORD | Louisville women hope to keep their Denny Crum kind of year rolling in Sweet 16 | Sports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Teams have a right to get better. It’s a lesson you have to keep in mind as season progress. It has become easier, as someone who has covered University of Louisville teams since 2000, to focus mainly on the dominant years, when you could count the basketball losses on one hand.

But those aren’t the norm. Before I ever covered Louisville basketball, I watched Louisville basketball. Denny Crum’s teams were never at their best in December or even January, sometimes. Often, they were good enough to keep winning anyway. But not always. And Crum scheduled for that. He wanted some tough early games, win or lose. He just wanted them ready for March.

As the calendar turned to 1986, Crum’s Louisville men’s team was 6-3. At the end of January, it was 12-6. But five of those losses were to ranked teams. And they developed toughness.

This has been a Denny Crum kind of season for the Louisville women’s basketball team, which will face Ole Miss tonight around 10 p.m. in its sixth straight NCAA Sweet 16 appearance.

In the transfer portal age when it takes longer for teams to gel, coach Jeff Walz asked a lot of his team early. He took it on the road to Belmont and Middle Tennessee. If you know women’s basketball, you know those aren’t games you play if you’re scheduling for wins.

They played two tournament teams in the Bahamas, and lost to a top-5 Ohio State team after leading briefly by 17. And all that was before the first week in December was over.

“Everybody is like, oh, you struggled early,” Walz said. “We played a very difficult schedule, probably too difficult to start the year. When we had the three transfers, we were trying to get players adjusted to new roles. I mean, we lose to Gonzaga in overtime down in the Bahamas, to South Dakota State, Ohio State. I mean, it's not like we were just getting beat by some bad teams. But I thought the schedule ended up helping us as we learned to get tougher and finish out games because the majority of those games we had leads in. We played nine teams and lost 11 games, and I think eight of them advanced to the NCAA tournament this year, and the ninth played in the NIT. So we had a schedule that was very competitive, but it's helped us.”

Louisville showed flashes of solid offense early in the season, but couldn’t always sustain it. The team was prone to long offensive droughts, sometimes at the most inopportune moments in the second half. It has found ways to avoid those, for the most part, over the past month.

Over the past 5 games, Louisville has ranked among the top handful of teams in the nation in offensive rating, offensive rebounding percentage, turnover percentage, and assist-to turnover ratio. It has been one of the nation’s leaders in field-goal attempts per game and 2-point field goal attempts per game.

It also lagged behind on defense, and that took well into February, when Walz settled on a change in lineups, to begin to come around.

He had to figure out how best to use Chrislyn Carr, who is more of a scoring point guard than Chelsie Hall was a year ago, and wound up bringing her off the bench. The same was true of transfer Morgan Jones, who is athletic and a gifted scorer, but who needed time to fit in defensively and from a consistency standpoint.

Merrissah Russell began the season down the bench, but has become a key contributor off it.

And on down the line. On this team, Hailey Van Lith receives much of the attention, and she’s worthy of it. Even her game, though, has needed to evolve. She needed to become more efficient on offense, and she has. Mykasa Robinson, always a defensive standout, has improved offensively. Olivia Cochran does things nobody sees. She is as important as any player on the team.

Louisville beat a bigger Texas team on the boards, 42-34. Cochran had only 2 rebounds. But that, Walz said, was deceiving.

“Olivia Cochran, zero rebounds in the first half, zero. But she was phenomenal,” Walz said. “See if you just look at stats, you don't realize what she did. She made sure that Taylor Jones, DeYona Gaston, whoever, was not going to get the rebound. So, she boxed them out. Then everybody else was able to come in and clean it up.”

What Louisville has going for it tonight is a core of players who have played and won in Sweet 16 games. Walz, in fact, has won 4 of them in a row by an average margin of 18.5 points. Louisville is 17-4 in its past 21 tournament games since 2018. It is 10-2 in the NCAA Tournament since the COVID cancellation, and both losses were to the eventual national champions.

In Ole Miss, Louisville will face one of the best shot-blocking and rebounding teams left in the tournament. Defensively, Ole Miss is one of the best teams in the country, having taken top-ranked South Carolina to overtime and bounced No. 1 seed Stanford from the tournament.

The Rebels have not shot it particularly well over the past 5 games, but they make up for that with elite offensive rebounding and not beating themselves with turnovers.

Louisville’s ability to create turnovers and convert them into a few easy baskets will be a key. But Ole Miss has not made a habit of letting that happen.

Walz said the key will be in-game adjustments and offensive flexibility.

“You've got to be able to adapt and adjust and figure out, OK, if they're not allowing you to score this way, how can we score the basketball?” Walz said. “We have taken a lot of pride here that when someone will always ask me, what's your philosophy, what kind of offense do you like to run, what do you do? Our philosophy is we try to win. So, if we’ve got to play zone, we play zone. If we need to play man, we play man. If we need to run sets, we run sets. So we'll have to adjust in this game. We'll figure out -- try and figure out what they're trying to do to stop us and then adjust to it. If our plan A doesn't work, we'll go to plan B. If plan B doesn't work, we'll go to C. Then if we got to go to D, we'll just start praying.”

Walz said, like Louisville, Ole Miss was very competitive against some very good teams, to the point where he wasn’t surprised when the Rebels beat Stanford.

“Ole Miss plays in a great league against great teams night-in and night-out. Same thing as we do,” Walz said. “So would I consider it to be huge upsets that Ole Miss is here and we are here? No. You can just go back and look at their games that they played throughout the year. They played South Carolina to overtime, very competitive games in all the ones that they got beat in the SEC. Same thing with us. So am I completely shocked? No. I'm expecting a great game.”