It’s been a tumultuous five days for Princeton women’s basketball.
On Saturday night, the Tigers’ memorable season came to a crashing halt at 26-4 in a humbling 82-68 loss to Oklahoma State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
Then, four days later, Princeton coach Carla Berube announced she was leaving Old Nassau for purpler pastures at Northwestern.
Now, Orange and Black nation is holding its collective breath waiting to see if any Princeton players will defect with Berube to Northwestern, where they can earn athletic scholarships and NIL dollars while plying their craft on a larger stage than the one offered by Princeton.
And yet only a fortnight ago, Princeton women’s basketball appeared to be resurgent.
The Tigers had won an unexpected outright Ivy League championship on the last day of the regular season when they handled business at home against Yale and then watched Harvard upset Columbia in Morningside Heights.
Then, a week later at Ivy Madness in Ithaca, the Tigers powered their way past Brown and Havard to win their fifth Ivy League Tournament championship in the past eight years and their seventh consecutive trip to the Big Dance.
Why did everything suddenly go south for Princeton women’s basketball and where does the program go from here?
My answer to the first question is that Princeton’s convulsive week reflects the seismic state of intercollegiate sports in general, and the challenging climate facing all mid-majors in the world of college basketball.
Let’s start with Princeton’s lopsided loss to Oklahoma State at Pauley Pavilion last Saturday night.
Although Princeton wasn’t favored by oddsmakers to win, the expectation was that the No. 9 Tigers would at a minimum play a very competitive game against the No. 8 Cowgirls.
But it turned out the Ivy League champion and the fourth-place team from the Big XII were not as evenly matched as the pundits, including myself, had believed.
The Cowgirls were faster, stronger, taller and longer.
Berube had warned us that might be the case. She never bought into the pregame narrative that the Cowgirls and her Tigers were doppelgangers.
“Yeah, I guess if you look at the stats they look similar,” Berube said at her pregame press conference last Friday. “But I think the players are very different. They have strengths where we don’t, and vice versa.”
The Tigers had their moments on Saturday in their first ever matchup with Oklahoma State. They led for the first three minutes of the game and opened the third quarter with an impressive 11-0 run.
But for the most part, Princeton simply wasn’t that competitive with Oklahoma State.
The Cowgirls seized control of the game early behind their superior physicality on the offensive glass and led most of the game by double digits.
“There’s a toughness about the Big XII,” Berube said postgame. “You don’t see that length and that strength and that toughness as much in the Ivy League. That’s why we play the nonconference schedule that we have, but maybe we should get some Big XII opponents on our nonconference schedule . . . It’s a different brand of basketball.”
The fact that a very talented, very experienced Princeton squad wasn’t able to sustain 40 minutes of competitive play against the fourth-best team in the Big XII underscores the seemingly impossible odds facing mid-majors in their quest to compete against the upper-division teams in the power conferences in today’s college basketball landscape.
Not that it’s ever been easy for mid-majors at March Madness.
Until Berube arrived at Princeton for the 2019-20 season, the Ivy League had won only two times in four decades at the Big Dance – in 1998, when No. 16 Harvard shocked No. 1 Stanford, and in 2015, when Courtney Banghart led her undefeated Tigers to victory as a No. 8 seed over another mid-major, Wisconsin-Green Bay.
But now the rules are so stacked in favor of the power conferences, any vision of a mid-major advancing beyond the first round, let alone making a run to the Sweet 16 seems distant and faint.
Consider the results from this year’s Big Dance.
In 25 matchups between power-conference teams and mid-majors, the power conference teams won across the board. 25-0.
Sliced another way, not a single mid-major advanced beyond the first round of this year’s NCAA Tournament.
Mid-majors fared a bit better at last year’s Big Dance, but given the pace of change in college basketball, last season already seems like ancient history.
In 29 matchups against power conference opponents a year ago, three mid-majors prevailed in tournament games in the First Four and first round. Perhaps the most notable upset came courtesy of South Dakota State, who took down none other than the Oklahoma State Cowgirls in the first round of last year’s tournament.
How did Oklahoma State respond to a disheartening defeat a year ago?
During the offseason, the Cowgirls snatched away one of South Dakota State’s best players in the transfer portal, Haleigh Timmer.
If you can’t beat ‘em, steal their players.
On Saturday at Pauley Pavilion, Timmer turned her talents on Princeton, one of the highest-seeded mid-majors in the field of 68, and inflicted real damage, especially in a critical first quarter when Oklahoma State opened up an early double-digit lead.
In the era of NIL, revenue sharing and the transfer portal, teams like Oklahoma State can transform overnight or at least plug holes during the offseason. For example, this year’s OSU squad featured four transfers among its starting five, including Achol Akot, an athletic post player who burned Princeton for a career-high 28 points and 10 rebounds on Saturday.
At Princeton and for most mid-majors, the transfer portal is a double-edged sword with both blades pointed at the Tigers.
Not only does the portal funnel players to programs who play against the Tigers, like Timmer and Akot, it sucks talent away from mid-majors like Princeton and diverts it to the power conferences.
Last season, after Princeton was eliminated in the First Four of the NCAA Tournament by Iowa State, junior center Tabitha Amanze, a 6-foot-4 top-50 recruit when she committed to Princeton, entered the transfer portal and signed with Virginia in the ACC.
Amanze’s unexpected departure left Princeton with no rim protection this season, while her addition to an unheralded Cavaliers club boosted the Hoos on Monday to their first Sweet 16 in 26 years.
This brings us to the state of the Princeton program in the wake of Berube’s departure.
It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the program will continue to thrive in the immediate aftermath of Berube’s bolt to the Big Ten.
After all, four All-Ivy starters are slated to return to Jadwin for their senior years in November, meaning that the Tigers almost certainly will be selected as prohibitive favorites to repeat as Ivy champions next year.
And it’s certainly possible that athletic director John Mack will find a terrific replacement for Berube, just as his predecessor did seven years ago when another legendary coach departed Princeton to lead a power conference program.
In fact, if Mack can convince current associate head coach Lauren Gosselin to stay on campus, I believe the program will be in gifted hands.
Although Berube, a former national champion at UConn, has gotten all the attention for the unparalleled success of the program during her seven years at Princeton, Gosselin has played a critical behind-the-scenes role in creating the conditions for that success.
A former national champion herself at Division II Bentley, Gosselin has been the genius behind devising many of Princeton’s highly effective offensive sets. She also merits credit for recruiting many of the star players to come through central New Jersey during the Berube era.
Finally, one of the most unsung aspects of coaching at the mid-major level today is finding a way to put together a schedule that creates sufficient opportunities to build a tourney-worthy resume in case you don’t win your conference’s automatic bid to March Madness. Gosselin has done just that as an assistant at Princeton, masterfully finding a blend of high mid-majors and power0-conference opponents for the Tigers to play during the nonconference part of the season.
For these reasons and others, the most important step Princeton can take now to secure its immediate future as a nationally relevant, mid-major power is to lock down Gosselin as the 11th coach in the history of Princeton women’s basketball.
But even if Gosselin and Princeton’s incredible Class of ‘26 quartet decide to stay at Old Nassau, choppy waters lay ahead for the Orange and Black, the Ivy League, and all mid-majors, at least so far as competing on the national stage goes.
And yet it doesn’t have to be this way. The Ivy League could compete on the national landscape if it wanted to.
There is nothing keeping the Ivy League from granting athletic scholarships to its basketball players, like every other conference in Division I. There’s also nothing preventing the Ivy League from participating in revenue sharing, other than itself.
Ivy League schools could also recruit players through the transfer portal, and some are beginning to do so.
A few years ago, Columbia women’s basketball lured Cecelia Collins from Bucknell, an addition that helped the Lions win their first outright Ivy League regular season title last season.
Yale has also found a way to add multiple transfers to its improving women’s basketball roster.
But at most Ivy schools, including Princeton and Harvard, the portal remains forbidden fruit, primarily due to barriers erected by admissions policies that disfavor transfers across the board.
“We can’t get transfers,” Harvard coach Carrie Moore flatly told reporters at her weekly press conference on March 10. “I’ll just blatantly say that we can’t do it. And I think your folks at Princeton also cannot do that.”
Unless and until programs like Harvard’s and Princeton’s make it a priority to allow high-impact basketball transfers to enroll on their campuses, they likely won’t be able to keep talented coaches like Moore and Berube around for lengthy stints.
This doesn’t mean Princeton (and Harvard) won’t have great seasons next year. They (probably) will.
In fact, if Gosselin is hired as head coach and Fadima Tall, Skye Belker, Ashley Chea, and Olivia Hutcherson return for their senior campaigns, the Tigers likely will repeat as Ivy champions and cut down the nets in Hanover at Ivy Madness next March.
But barring a lightning strike, that’s where the magic carpet ride will end.
The dream of a Sweet 16 appears to be dead.
The dream of taking down a power conference opponent in the First Round of March Madness grows dimmer by the day.
Cinderella may still be allowed to attend the Big Dance, but she’s no longer allowed to win.
And if by some chance she does win, her best players and her coach will be stolen away by bigger fish who swim in bigger ponds.