Lady Bears claim 4th straight Big 12 title
Tuesday night was a good night for Baylor basketball. In Waco, the men won their home finale over No. 16 Iowa State for their sixth win in seven tries, polishing their NCAA tournament resume. An hour later, the Lady Bears beat the Cyclones in Ames to clinch their fourth straight regular season Big 12 title.
For head coach Kim Mulkey’s squad, it was same old, same old, despite a starting lineup that featured four new faces compared to this time a year ago. And while senior Odyssey Sims has been arguably the nation’s best player this season, it was National Freshman of the Year candidate Nina Davis who stepped up big Tuesday night, scoring 26 points and pulling down nine rebounds to help the No. 9-ranked Lady Bears lock down a 70-54 win.
Baylor is the first Big 12 team ever to claim four straight women’s basketball regular season titles; that the Lady Bears were up to the task despite so much turnover from last year suggests this might be Mulkey’s finest coaching job yet. Sims (the nation’s leading scorer at nearly 30 points a game) and Davis (averaging 14 points and 9.0 rebounds) are the team’s only double-digit scorers, and yet here is Baylor: 26-4, 18-2 in the Big 12, with their 11th straight 25-win season and 10th Big 12 title in program history.
The Lady Bears will enter this weekend’s Big 12 Championship as the No. 1 overall seed; after a first-round bye, they will face the winner of Kansas/Kansas State Saturday at 1:3o p.m. on FSN. The Baylor men, meanwhile, are headed to Manhattan, Kan., for the regular-season finale against Kansas State; that game will tip at 12:30 p.m. Saturday on the Big 12 Network.
Sic ’em, Baylor basketball!
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