STARKVILLE — The last Mississippi State women’s basketball season ended with a Sweet 16 loss to eventual national champion Connecticut, a loss so spectacularly bad it was as if the Bulldogs got together and decided, “Well, we’re not going to do THAT again.”
So they haven’t.
On Monday night, before a pulsing crowd of 8,840 at Humphrey Coliseum, Mississippi State fought off Ole Miss, 73-62, for a school-record 19-0 start. The Bulldogs, ranked No. 4 in the nation, and top-ranked UConn are the nation’s only unbeaten teams.
Unbeaten, yep. Unbeatable? Probably not, if Monday’s game was any indicator. It was a workmanlike effort, nothing fancy.
That take-care-of -business approach seems to apply how the Bulldogs are handling their unparalleled success.
Whatever burden goes along with the expectations that accompany the streak, the Bulldogs seem to be bearing up nicely.
“It’s another record,” MSU senior guard Dominique Dillingham said with a shrug. “That’s great, but we’ve got another game Thursday, so we’ve got to get ready for that.”
In some cases, there is a phobia attached to unbeaten streaks, and players and coaches avoid even speaking of it, as if any mention of the streak is some sort of jinx.
Schaefer’s approach is to acknowledge the streak and move on.
“All I tell my kids is, ‘Look, if we happen to stub our toes, that’s OK. But let’s stub our toes playing hard, doing things the right way,'” Schaefer said. “You can’t go around saying, ‘What if?'”
There are no constraints on how fans react to the Bulldogs’ success. None of the 8,840 people that swarmed into the Hump have a game to play Thursday. They are free to celebrate, and they did.
Suddenly, improbably, women’s basketball at Mississippi State is a big deal. In fact, it’s huge. Monday’s crowd was the second-biggest in program history.
MSU smashed attendance records in its two previous seasons and appears to be well on its way to doing it again this year, pushing its average home game attendance beyond the 6,500 mark.
Those kind of crowds are far from common in the women’s game.
“But it’s now the norm at Mississippi State and maybe 10, 12 other places,” Schaefer said. “That’s all.”
How impressive is it? Even Ole Miss coach Matt Insell took note.
“It was a great night for women’s basketball in the state of Mississippi,” Insell said. “I mean, 8,800 people came to see this game. I told Vic after the game, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but my God…”
What MSU is doing, Schaefer said, is assembling a team of tough, gritty players whose passion for “doing things the right way” has inspired a following no one could rightly have imagined.
“I”m as proud of that as anything we’ve done,” Schaefer said.
The Bulldogs have 11 regular season games remaining, plus the Southeastern Conference tournament and however far the Bulldogs manage to go in the NCAA tournament, which could be quite a ways — maybe even as far as another meeting with you-know-who.
But 19 wins are a lot. In fact, it might be hard to remember the last time the Bulldogs lost a game, right coach?
“Are you really going to ask me that?” Schaefer responded in mock anger. “Next question.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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