No. 4 UConn women fall to Marquette, 59-52, on the road, lose back-to-back games for first time since 1993

The streak is over.

With its 59-52 loss at Marquette on Wednesday night in Milwaukee, the UConn women’s basketball team dropped back-to-back games for the first time since March 1993.

The No. 4 Huskies suffered a 81-77 defeat at the hands of No. 1 South Carolina on Sunday. The program had been 74-0 following losses dating back to 1993, but the Huskies couldn’t hold on. The streak ended at 1,083 games.

The Huskies’ injuries and lack of depth finally caught up to them, their exhaustion evident on the court as mental errors plagued them throughout the night. This was UConn’s first loss in program history to the Golden Eagles after coming out victorious in each of the prior 16 meetings.

“I think mentally all of us — no one in particular — I think we just checked out,” UConn head coach Geno Auriemma said in a postgame interview with SNY’s Maria Marino. “I told the team this, I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for us to have that kind of mental checkout. That’s the first time all year in 20 some games that’s happened. And tonight happened to be that night against the wrong team.”

The Huskies (21-4, 13-1 Big East) scored their fewest points in any game all season and committed 19 turnovers to drop their first game in conference play. They shot 21 of 52 (40.4%) from the field, 3 of 13 (23.1%) from long range and 7 of 12 (58.3%) at the free-throw line.

Chloe Marotta led Marquette with 19 points, nine rebounds and three assists. Jordan King had 18 points and three rebounds.

Dorka Juhász led UConn with a double-double of 15 points and 11 rebounds, along with three blocks and two steals. Aubrey Griffin had 12 points and six rebounds and Lou Lopez Sénéchal had 12 points, while Aaliyah Edwards was held to eight points and 12 rebounds. Nika Mühl had seven assists.

“They disrupted our whole offense,” Auriemma said. “We probably didn’t push the pace as much as we would like. I think mentally, we were just drained.”

The Huskies still had only eight players available, as Caroline Ducharme (concussion) missed her 12th consecutive game and Azzi Fudd (right knee) missed her eighth in a row since re-aggravating her injury. Though UConn head coach Geno Auriemma was optimistic that she might return this week, Ducharme was still wearing a green pinney at shootaround on Wednesday, which indicates she has only been cleared for light contact, according to Marino.

The Huskies jumped out to a 6-0 lead and held Marquette without a bucket for nearly three and a half minutes to start the night. Sénéchal used a step-through move to get past her defender and score the 2000th point of her college career to give UConn an 8-2 lead with under six minutes left in the first.

But things got out of hand from there as the Huskies’ got sloppy and made a string of mental errors that led to turnovers. King drained a 3-pointer to spark a personal 10-0 run that gave the Golden Eagles the lead as UConn went scoreless for four minutes. The Huskies never regained it.

“We started the game like it was going to go exactly the way we had planned,” Auriemma said. “As it started to go the other way, that one stretch in the first quarter I think where we had maybe four or five straight turnovers, I think that just completely totally deflated us.”

The Huskies trailed 16-10 at the end of the first quarter, but that didn’t stop the bleeding. They allowed Marquette to go on a 21-4 run across the first and second quarters and were down 13 points. Mühl broke the drought with a driving layup with 7:19 left.

UConn went on a 12-2 run from there behind the play of Edwards and Mühl. With 1:25 left, Mühl found Edwards in the paint to record her 200th assist this season — just the sixth player to do so in program history — and trim the deficit to 25-22.

At the halftime break the Huskies trailed 27-22. They committed 11 turnovers, shot 10 of 25 (40%) from the field and went 0 of 5 from deep in the first half.

With a little over eight minutes left in the third, Juhász emphatically swatted away a layup attempt from Marquette’s Lisa Karlen and the Huskies got going on the fast break. On the other end, Lopez Sénéchal found a wide open Griffin, who drained UConn’s first triple of the game. Then Mühl found Edwards inside for a layup to tie the game at 31 with 6:10 left, capping off a 7-0 run.

The Huskies didn’t regain the lead, though, as Marquette instead built its advantage back up to five after that. They trailed 39-38 at the end of the third.

“It was a major struggle because they were so locked in, their team, in what they wanted to do and what they wanted to run and how they wanted to run it,” Auriemma said of the Golden Eagles. “And all the credit to them because they were really, really, really good. And we came back and we tied it or got it to one or whatever, but we could never ever, ever, mentally get past that point.”

King subbed out of the game less than a minute into the fourth after Lopez Sénéchal drove into the lane and drew a foul. But UConn couldn’t capitalize on Marquette’s star being out and she scored almost as soon as she subbed back in, hitting a jumper to give the home team a 49-42 lead with 3:22 left.

Griffin responded with a driving layup, but the Huskies still trailed by five with time running out.

Marotta, who had torched UConn all night along with King, made a jumper to give Marquette a 51-44 lead with 1:35 left.

Just as it seemed the game was gone, Juhász came through with a triple — just the Huskies’ second of the game — to make it a four-point game with 1:20 left. Emily La Chappell made a layup after that to halt any hope in its tracks, however.

The Golden Eagles stretched its lead to 10 points with free-throws from King in the final minute as UConn continued to struggle.

Auriemma called a timeout with 23 seconds left and Mühl made a 3-pointer, but the game was already all but over as the Huskies’ historic streak came to a close.

“There was a collective something different about today. It had all the signs,” Auriemma said. “There would be things that we would say on on on the bench … and then we would go out and it would be completely opposite, and that’s never happened this year. I mean, on occasion it’s happened, but not that consistently over and over and over again. And that’s when you know mentally they’re just not here. And God bless them. I mean, I don’t know how they’ve done it this long, to be honest with you.”