In a first NCAA tournament game as a head coach, Sue Troyan remembers the camera flashes popping as she looked up at the scoreboard: 6–4. For a minute, her No. 16 seed Lehigh was ahead of No. 1 UConn. Now, with utsa set to meet UConn in the NCAA Tournament first round, that tiny slice of time captures the human reality of what this matchup can feel like.
What happens when a No. 16 seed faces No. 1 UConn in the NCAA Tournament?
The basketball is only part of it. Troyan, who spent 27 seasons coaching women’s basketball at Lehigh, described an atmosphere where attention can lock onto even the most ordinary early-game sequence. The scoreboard read like “the opening minutes of any first quarter, ” she said, but the reaction inside the building made clear it wasn’t ordinary at all: people were photographing the moment because it was UConn, and because a top seed being trailed—even briefly—becomes a kind of instant artifact.
“That was it, ” Troyan said with a laugh, recalling the 6–4 start. “We never led again. But we could say we led for a minute. ” Her team went on to lose 103–35, a margin that later stood as part of a larger pattern: six of the 11 most lopsided wins in Division I tournament history for either men or women belong to Geno Auriemma and UConn, including that 68-point win over Lehigh in 1997.
For utsa, the broader fact embedded in those numbers is not just the challenge of playing a top seed, but the specific weight of playing a program that carries its own gravitational pull in March—one that can turn a single early basket, a single lead, into a flashbulb moment.
Why does UConn carry a different kind of pressure in March?
Troyan’s memory points to something coaches have come to describe as a shared understanding: first-round matchups between a top seed and a bottom seed are difficult in any tournament, and facing a storied program or a legendary coach adds pressure. But, as that consensus goes, drawing UConn—described as historically dominant, fundamentally unstoppable, and bigger than the usual language of dynasties—creates a different kind of experience.
In Troyan’s telling, even 1997 carried a sense that the program was becoming something “special. ” Geno Auriemma and the Huskies had already won their first national championship with an undefeated season in 1995, drawing what was described as unprecedented media attention. What followed in the decades after only deepened the shorthand: the UConn name itself became an easy stand-in for basketball excellence, with 11 more championships under Auriemma, and counting.
This is the context utsa steps into: not merely a game against a higher seed, but a game against a program that has taught the sport’s audience to expect dominance—and taught underdogs that even their best sequences may be remembered more as a novelty than a turning point.
How do coaches talk to players when the matchup feels predetermined?
Troyan’s anecdote—equal parts pride, humor, and realism—offers one answer without pretending to solve the problem. If the underdog’s biggest moment can be a one-minute lead, the job becomes intensely human: to help players hold onto the meaning of being there, even while staring at the scale of what they are up against.
The question that sits beneath the matchup is the one Troyan’s experience raises directly: how do you coach a team up for that kind of experience? What do you tell your players when the opponent is a program that has produced some of the most lopsided tournament results in Division I history? There is no single script provided by the facts at hand, only the lived memory of a coach who watched a small moment become a permanent one.
In that sense, the first round is not only a test of preparation. It is a test of attention—how to keep a team inside its own goals when the arena, the cameras, and the mythology of the opponent keep pulling everyone’s eyes elsewhere. It is also a test of narrative: whether the underdog can define success in ways that are not limited to the final margin.
As the tournament turns to matchups like utsa versus UConn, the emotional center of the story may again be found in something as plain as a scoreboard early in the game. That’s what Troyan wanted to “commit to memory, ” because it belonged to her team, even if it didn’t last. And that is the unresolved question that follows any underdog into this kind of first round: what moment will be theirs to keep when the flashes begin?
