Staff Reporter
Syracuse’s 2025 to 2026 women’s basketball season ended the way a lot of March Madness seasons end, under fluorescent light at Harry A. Gampel Pavilion in Storrs with UConn on the other bench. The ninth-seeded Orange fell 98 to 45 in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on March 23, two nights after a 72 to 63 first-round win over Iowa State. That is the short version. The longer version is about what Dyaisha Fair built, what Felisha Legette-Jack kept running after Fair left, and what it actually takes to reach week two of the bracket when your program has not been to a Final Four since 2016.
Fair’s line in the record book is permanent
Fair finished her college career in April 2024, third on the all-time NCAA Division I women’s career scoring list behind only Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Plum. She left with 3,403 points across five seasons, three at Buffalo and two at Syracuse. She also left holding the record for most minutes ever played in Division I women’s basketball, a statistic that tells you as much about her role as any scoring title. Fair played 40 minutes five times in her first Syracuse season alone.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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The career finale was at Gampel Pavilion too. On March 25, 2024, Syracuse lost 72 to 64 to third-seeded UConn in the second round. Fair scored 20 points on four made three-pointers in her final college game, the shot total that moved her past a row of Hall of Famers and into that top three. The Orange went 24 and 8 that year, finished No. 20 in the final AP poll, and Fair was named an Associated Press Third-Team All-American. At Buffalo she scored 2,035 points in 88 games across three seasons. At Syracuse she added 1,368 points in 65 games across two. Combined, she averaged 22.2 points, 4.9 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.5 steals across 153 college games.
Before Syracuse, Fair played three seasons at Buffalo under Legette-Jack, who had recruited her out of Edison Tech High School in Rochester. At Buffalo she was Mid-American Conference Freshman of the Year in 2020 after averaging 22.0 points as a freshman, MAC Tournament MVP in 2022, and a two-time First Team All-MAC selection. She averaged 23.4 points per game in 37.4 minutes as a junior and led Buffalo to the 2022 NCAA Tournament. When Legette-Jack took the Syracuse job in March 2022, Fair followed. So did Georgia Woolley, Saniaa Wilson and Cheyenne McEvans, with Dominique Camp joining a year later as a graduate transfer. That five-player Buffalo-to-Syracuse migration is what built the program the current roster inherited.
Fair was the 16th overall pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft, taken by the Las Vegas Aces in the second round on April 15, 2024 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She made her regular-season debut on May 25 against Indiana, registered two assists in four minutes, and was waived the next day. She then signed with Al Ula in Saudi Arabia, with Maccabi Haifa in Israel for the 2024 to 2025 season, and later with Al Ahly in Egypt’s Superleague. Her WNBA future is open. Her college record is closed.
A Fair-less roster still gets to 24 wins
The 2025 to 2026 team had no Fair, no Woolley, no Camp, no Kyra Wood, no Izabel Varejao, no Saniaa Wilson. It had four key transfers: forward Aurora Almon from Miami, guard Laila Phelia from Texas (and Michigan before that), guard Dominique Darius from USC (and UCLA before that), and center Oyindamola Akinbolawa from Auburn. Returning guards Sophie Burrows and Olivia Schmitt gave the backcourt some continuity. Senior forward Journey Thompson, an Arizona State transfer in her second year on the Hill, returned for her fifth season. Legette-Jack entered her fourth year with the program and closed the regular season 22 and 7, 12 and 6 in the Atlantic Coast Conference, tied for fifth place.
Syracuse started the year 11 and 1. The lone early loss was a 81 to 55 beating by No. 6 Michigan in Uncasville on November 23 at the Basketball Hall of Fame Women’s Showcase. Legette-Jack picked up her 400th career win in the season opener on November 4, a 74 to 50 home dispatch of Stony Brook that made her the fourth active ACC head coach past the 400 line. The signature regular-season wins came in a January run. A 79 to 60 road win at No. 19 Virginia on January 11, where Phelia went for a career-high 38 points. A triple-overtime 90 to 87 thriller over California at the Dome on January 15, where Dominique Darius buried a three-pointer in the final five seconds for the walkoff. A 69 to 58 home win over Stanford on January 18 in the Cardinal’s first-ever trip to the JMA Dome. Syracuse swept the ACC road trips to Boston College and Miami, beat Auburn 66 to 60 in the ACC versus SEC Challenge, and closed the regular season with a 90 to 65 home win over Boston College.
The losses were instructive. A 71 to 51 home defeat to Duke on December 28 closed a calendar year where the gap between Syracuse and the ACC’s top tier was clear. A 75 to 55 home loss to Virginia Tech on January 8 showed the same thing. A 77 to 71 overtime road loss at North Carolina on January 25. The 84 to 65 home loss to sixth-ranked Louisville on February 8. The 82 to 69 road loss to NC State on February 22. The Orange beat the teams it should beat. It lost, sometimes narrowly and sometimes not, to the ranked teams.
The ACC Tournament and the bracket
As the seven seed in the ACC Tournament at Gas South Arena in Duluth, Georgia, Syracuse drew a bye into the second round, handled No. 10 seed California 70 to 59 on March 5, and then lost to second-seeded and 12th-ranked Louisville 87 to 61 in the quarterfinals on March 6. Uche Izoje, the freshman center, was named to the All-ACC Tournament Second Team after averaging 22.5 points and 9.5 rebounds across those two games while shooting 58.8 percent from the field. The NCAA selection committee placed Syracuse as the nine seed in the Fort Worth 1 regional, matching it against eight-seed Iowa State in the first round at Gampel Pavilion, UConn’s home floor. It was the third straight NCAA Tournament where Syracuse drew UConn’s territory under Legette-Jack.
Syracuse won the Iowa State game 72 to 63 on March 21. Four Orange players scored in double figures. Uche Izoje led the team with 23 points, Phelia added 18, Schmitt 15, Burrows 14. Thompson pulled down 13 rebounds. Iowa State’s Audi Crooks dropped 37 in a losing effort. The win marked back-to-back NCAA Tournament first-round victories for Syracuse under Legette-Jack, tracking the 2023 to 2024 team’s first-round win over Arizona in Portland.
Running into UConn
Two nights later the Orange ran into a buzz saw. Top-seeded and top-ranked UConn beat Syracuse 98 to 45 on March 23, a 53-point margin that sits among the largest losses in Syracuse women’s basketball NCAA Tournament history. UConn led 33 to 8 after one quarter, 65 to 12 at halftime. Azzi Fudd scored 34 points on eight made three-pointers. Sarah Strong and Blanca Quiñonez added 18 apiece. Uche Izoje led the Orange with 12 points, her 26th double-digit scoring game of the season. Phelia added 10. Thompson grabbed eight rebounds. Burrows dished three assists. Syracuse shot 32.8 percent from the field, 5.6 percent from three, and committed 20 turnovers. Sophomore guard Maddy Potts made her second consecutive start.
UConn finished the tournament as the No. 1 overall seed and moved on to its 32nd consecutive Sweet 16. The matchup pitted the Orange against a roster led by Paige Bueckers and Fudd, a tier of national talent Syracuse has not assembled since the 2016 Final Four team. Legette-Jack did not hide her frustration with the draw in the postgame press conference. She told reporters the repeated path through Storrs felt like a “personal attack,” noting Syracuse had drawn UConn in the second round three straight tournaments and said the program had “earned the right to go anywhere outside of a four-hour radius.” The 53-point gap was not a statement about effort. It was a statement about roster construction at the top of women’s college basketball and how much space sits between the bracket’s nine line and its one.
| Round | Opponent | Score | Orange Leaders |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | 8 seed Iowa State | W 72-63 | Izoje 23 pts, Phelia 18, Thompson 13 reb |
| Second | 1 seed UConn | L 45-98 | Izoje 12 pts, Phelia 10, Thompson 8 reb |
Legette-Jack’s record speaks for itself
Legette-Jack is now 80 and 48 at Syracuse across four seasons, a .625 winning percentage. Her overall college coaching record stands at 423 and 327, a .564 mark accumulated at Hofstra, Indiana, Buffalo, and Syracuse. She went 202 and 115 in 10 seasons at Buffalo from 2012 to 2022, led the Bulls to four NCAA Tournament bids and a 2018 Sweet 16 run, and left as the program’s all-time winningest coach. She was named ACC Coach of the Year in 2024, the Fair farewell season, the first Syracuse head coach in men’s or women’s basketball ever to win the honor. She is a 1985 Big East Rookie of the Year at Syracuse, the program’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder at 1,526 points and 927 rebounds when she graduated, and the first female athlete in any sport to have her jersey retired by the school. Her No. 33 was raised to the Dome rafters on November 14, 2021.
Her coaching staff is almost entirely new. Natasha Adair, a former Arizona State and Delaware head coach, came on as associate head coach for 2025 to 2026. Khyreed Carter runs recruiting as assistant head coach. Amber Moore joined as an assistant in her first year. Caleb Samson handles video coordination and assistant duties. The continuity is Legette-Jack, the front office, and the players.
The 2025 to 2026 recruiting haul was already in the building this season. Incoming class members Jasmyn Cooper from Noble and Greenough in North Easton, Massachusetts, Justus Fitzgerald from Norcross High School in Roswell, Georgia, Camdyn Nelson from St. Luke’s in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Uche Izoje, the 6-foot-3 center from Asaba in Nigeria’s Delta State, all suited up as freshmen. Izoje’s emergence is the single biggest personnel development from the season. She averaged 15.0 points and 9.3 rebounds per game on 55.3 percent shooting, led the ACC in field-goal percentage and blocks per game, was named the ACC Rookie of the Year, landed on the All-ACC First Team, the ACC All-Defensive Team, the ACC All-Freshman Team, and was tabbed a WBCA All-America Honorable Mention. She announced her return for a sophomore season on March 27.
What this season actually meant
The blunt read is this. Syracuse women’s basketball did not reach the 2026 Final Four. The Orange has not reached a Final Four since Quentin Hillsman’s 2016 team. The 2025 to 2026 season was the third straight 20-win campaign under Legette-Jack, a back-to-back NCAA Tournament second round, and a roster rebuild that absorbed the departures of Fair, Woolley, Wood, Camp, and Izabel Varejao without collapsing.
That is not a Final Four. It is also not nothing. A program that went 12 and 18 in 2024 to 2025 climbed back to 24 and 9 and a tournament bid in one off-season. The hard part, the part every mid-tier ACC program faces, is the step from second round to Sweet 16. Duke made it to the regional semifinals and won the 2026 ACC Tournament. Louisville, Notre Dame, North Carolina, Virginia Tech, and NC State all outranked Syracuse in the final ACC standings. That is the competitive math.
Fair’s jersey will hang in the Dome eventually. She is third on the NCAA career scoring list, with the most minutes ever played, and she was drafted into the WNBA. The current roster is Legette-Jack’s to develop. The offseason has already started answering the next question. Phelia signed a training camp contract with the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream on April 14. Shy Hawkins, the sophomore wing from Mastic Beach, announced her return. Sarah Rambus, a 6-foot-3 forward who averaged 6.3 points and 2.4 rebounds for Oregon in 2025 to 2026, became the first transfer-portal commit of the spring on April 13, followed by an April 17 letter-of-intent from Madison Howard, a guard out of Monsignor Scanlan High School in the Bronx. The ceiling is whether a healthy Izoje, a returning cast, and the next transfer class can turn this program’s ninth seed into a five or a six, and whether that five or six can finally beat a UConn or a South Carolina on a neutral floor in March.
Note: This article draws on verified public records including cuse.com postgame reports, Wikipedia’s 2025 to 2026 season game logs, Basketball Reference career statistics, the NCAA record book, ESPN and Fox Sports box scores for the Iowa State and UConn games, and 2026 ACC standings. Roster heights, hometowns and transfer histories come from the official Syracuse Athletics roster page. Dyaisha Fair’s career numbers and WNBA draft position are from the WNBA Draft record and Basketball Reference. Legette-Jack’s coaching totals are from Sports Reference. Izoje’s individual honors are from official ACC releases and cuse.com.
