59 and Counting…

Parity is generally a good thing in sports. The more teams or athletes that are competitive, the more fans that stay interested throughout the season and the greater the overall health of the sport (NB: for simplicity and clarity’s sake, for the rest of this article, I will use the word “team” to refer to both teams and individual athletes). No one wants to see the same couple of teams win year-in, year-out; for the most part, the casual fan drops out when his or her guys do, leaving only the diehards.

Perhaps the only exception to this rule is when one team is so completely dominant as to be playing in a league of their own. Such dominance attracts additional attention, either to see just how great those teams can be or to see them finally fall. Quite simply, whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to respect (and admire) ‘em.

Tiger Woods was that way before the ignominious revelations of last year. So was Michael Phelps. The UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team during the ’70s. Even, I’ll admit it, my most hated of teams, the New York Yankees, back in their glory years of the late 1920s to the early 1960s (not their current victorious squad, which would make Joe D., The Iron Horse and The Babe role over in their graves).

Riding a 59-game winning streak, the Connecticut Huskies women’s basketball team is currently in just such a category. Not a single one of those games has even been close; the Huskies have crushed their opponents by double digits every time they have taken the floor during the streak.

I wrote about this team last year, when they had only won 18 in a row to start the season. If anything, the 2009-2010 Huskies may be better than the ’08-’09 squad that went undefeated en route to a national championship. UConn’s average margin of victory this year is 39.2 points; their lowest, 12 points over then #2 Stanford (the highest? 70 points better than Northeastern).

In six games against the Top 25, the Huskies still have outscored their opponents 480 to 326, for a 25.7 average margin of victory. That includes a 41-point trouncing of then #7 North Carolina and a 33-point beat down of then #7 Duke.

UConn has tied Louisiana Tech’s 1980-82 record of 36 consecutive weeks ranked #1 in the AP Poll, a record that the Huskies will almost assuredly break next week barring some miracle in Saturday’s game against Pittsburgh (12-7, 1-5 Big East). They trail the all-time NCAA women’s basketball consecutive win streak of 70 games by a mere 11 victories–a mark set by the 2001-03 Huskies, incidentally. Is there any reason not to believe that this Connecticut squad is fully capable of not just breaking that record, but shattering it, on the way to a second consecutive perfect season?

I know that there are many out there who do not follow women’s basketball (not surprisingly, that is not the case at UConn, where the women play in front of just as raucous sell-out crowds at Gampel Pavilion as the men do). There also many who denigrate the women’s game due to the lesser size, strength and speed of the female players; unfairly so, in my mind, for the women make up for that physicality by playing a more fundamental, better team brand of basketball than the individualistic, show-off nature of the star-driven men’s game. Regardless, even these critics must admit that Connecticut’s current run is extremely impressive.

The only question is: how long can it continue?