UConn’s Geno Auriemma weighs in: What’s with all the upsets, and a lack of a clear frontrunner, in women’s college basketball this year?

Last weekend three teams ranked at the time in the top eight of the Associated Press women’s college basketball poll were upset. Hardly anyone batted an eye.

South Carolina, No. 2, lost to No. 21 Tennessee in SEC play. Third-ranked Louisville, which had spent three weeks at No. 1 earlier in the season, dropped an ACC game to unranked Florida State, and No. 8 UCLA fell to unranked Oregon State.

Certainly, women’s college basketball has more parity recently than ever before. Four different teams have won the last four national titles, and it may have been five had last season’s tournament not been canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

But parity is only one explanation for the phenomenon seen so far during the regular season — which includes having four different No. 1 teams for only the fourth season the AP poll has been around. Many analysts agree there’s no clear frontrunner for the national championship and some think as many as seven or eight teams have a shot at it.

The other factors at play according to Geno Auriemma, coach of No. 1 UConn? For one, the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Home and away games are exactly the same now,” Auriemma said Tuesday. “You get no benefit from playing at home. You get no penalty for playing on the road. The energy level is zero. When you play sometimes, a team can get juiced up and play great because the crowd is really helping them, whether it’s a home crowd or whether it’s a road crowd. So you have none of that [this year]. You have to trust the players to bring their own, which that doesn’t go over great sometimes.”

UConn has only had friends and family of the program allowed to attend games at Gampel Pavilion this season. Their sole loss was at Arkansas in front of a crowd of 4,000. While the Big East Tournament is not going to have fans, the NCAA Tournament will allow arenas to fill up to 17 percent capacity beginning with the Sweet 16 round.

And that’s not to mention all the COVID-19 stoppages teams have faced. UConn had the first two weeks of its season delayed after a member of the program tested positive. NC State was coming off an extended COVID pause when it lost to Virginia Tech and was playing without its best player, Elissa Cunane. Stanford, the second team to assume the No. 1 spot this season, spent nine weeks on the road, unable to play or practice on its home court due to local COVID-19 restrictions. Back-to-back losses to Colorado and UCLA were in the middle of that grueling stretch.

“I do think COVID has affected a lot of teams,” UConn junior Olivia Nelson-Ododa said. “It definitely affected our team for those two weeks, so I can only imagine for other teams who’ve maybe been shut down once, twice, multiple times, or not at all but had to miss games and couldn’t get into certain rhythms.”

But not everything can be connected to the pandemic. Last year’s WNBA Draft resulted in a mass exodus of an incredible talent from the college level — leaving teams like Oregon, South Carolina and Baylor without reliable, experienced upperclassmen leaders. UConn, too, has seven freshmen and no seniors after Crystal Dangerfield graduated and Megan Walker left early for the league. The 2021 WNBA Draft class, by comparison, is generally considered weaker.

While UConn leans on freshman Paige Bueckers, others have similarly asked their first-year players to embrace meaningful roles. Louisville’s Hailey Van Lith, Oregon’s Te-Hina Paopao and Maryland’s Angel Reese are prime examples.

“So many teams are playing with young kids. This is not exactly a senior-dominated season,” Auriemma said. “You’ve got a lot of young players playing for a lot of teams, and they’re going to be up and down.”

All those factors, combined with the sport’s trend toward more parity, make for a season where the national title is truly up for grabs. Though UConn may not be the clear frontrunner it’s been in other years, this still may be good news for a young team like Auriemma’s that is hungry to prove themselves come March.

“You have less dominant teams. You have more good teams moving up,” Auriemma said. “So that combination of what used to be great, great, great, great teams have come back down a little bit, and some of the other teams have moved up a little bit. So it’s narrowed the gap there.

“It should make the NCAA Tournament pretty exciting if it stays like this.”

Huskies named McDonald’s All Americans

There will not be a McDonald’s All-American game this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but three future Huskies were named McDonald’s All-Americans on Tuesday.

Azzi Fudd, Caroline Ducharme and Amari DeBerry all made the East team. They were three of the 24 high school athletes from around the country to make cut.

UConn has had 34 previous McDonald’s All-Americans, including, from its current roster, Christyn Williams, Nelson-Ododa, Aubrey Griffin, Paige Bueckers and Mir McLean. This is the first year since 2012 that three future Huskies were selected.

Saylor Poffenbarger, who signed with UConn in November, was not eligible since she opted to enroll early this semester.

Alexa Philippou can be reached at aphilippou@courant.com