March Madness: Three Bold Predictions for Women’s National Championship

Here’s what kind of mayhem could go down in Phoenix on Sunday.

Dawn Staley and South Carolina will play for a fourth national championship Sunday. | Joe Camporeale-Imagn Images

If you read our last set of bold predictions ahead of Friday’s women’s Final Four, you’ll notice at no point did we guess that UConn coach Geno Auriemma would confront South Carolina coach Dawn Staley postgame.

Yes, March Madness has a way of surprising. The Gamecocks’ clinical 62–48 victory over the Huskies was a legitimate stunner, as was UCLA’s ugly 51–44 win over Texas from an aesthetics standpoint. That leaves two teams to battle for all the marbles on Easter Sunday in Phoenix: a South Carolina program that has won two of the last four national championships, and a Bruins team that hadn’t made a Final Four until last year.

Here are three final bold predictions for this year’s much-anticipated championship showdown.

Lauren Betts again leads UCLA in scoring—and it’s not that close

That the Bruins center, the team’s leading scorer each of the last three seasons, would lead UCLA in scoring in the national championship is not a huge surprise. What will surprise: Betts will lead the Bruins by a significant margin. This wouldn’t have shocked last year—in 2025, she led UCLA in scoring by 7.4 points per game, and accounted for 26 of the Bruins’ 51 points in a blowout Final Four loss to UConn.

However, UCLA has become a more well-rounded team in 2026. Guard Kiki Rice is averaging career highs in points, rebounds and field-goal percentage. Forward Gabriela Jaquez is also averaging a career-best 13.3 points per game. It is a testament to the strength of the Gamecocks that the Bruins will have to operate as a bit of a one-woman show Sunday, but Betts is more than up to the task.

Raven Johnson bounces back in huge fashion, scoring 20

The All-American South Carolina guard has two primary purposes—to set the table and defend—and she excels at both of them. Her 5.2 assists per game ranked sixth in the SEC this season, and she finished third in defensive box plus/minus. Against TCU in the Elite Eight, she handed out six assists and pulled down eight rebounds while scoring 10 points on 4-for-12 shooting.’

Despite her strong all-around play and ability to score the basketball, Johnson has topped 20 points just once this season—in a 22-point outing against LSU in the SEC tournament semifinals on March 7. There’s a lesson to be drawn from there: the Tigers, like UCLA, were a stronger offensive team than they were a defensive team and goaded the Gamecocks into a high-scoring contest. That drew out the scorer in Johnson, who will render her 1-for-6 outing in the Final Four a distant memory with a potent showing Sunday.

Despite a small spread and two evenly matched teams, South Carolina wins by double digits

Can a top 20 defense in the country be a weak point? Per College Basketball Reference, the Bruins are 16th in the country with a defensive rating of 81.4. The Gamecocks are fourth at 77.7. UCLA has the edge in offensive rating, but it’s smaller. We’ve already established that this is going to be a high-scoring contest; the Bruins’ 40.9% shooting clip Friday was their third-worst of the season and should be viewed as an outlier—somewhat.

What the Longhorns proved Friday is that it is possible to slow UCLA’s attack with focused defense—Texas hounded the Bruins so thoroughly that it probably would’ve won had forward Madison Booker not endured a 3-for-23 shooting slog. If we assume no South Carolina player has a Booker-like stinker, and the Gamecocks clamp Jaquez and Rice while conceding an effective scoring day to Betts, this feels like South Carolina’s championship to lose—and another feather in the cap of the great Staley.

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