Late season slide puts Tech in suboptimal territory
After today’s loss to the Stanford Cardinal 87-82, Georgia Tech women’s basketball finishes the 2024-25 regular season at 21-9 (9-9 ACC), 9th in the conference and will play Virginia Tech on Thursday afternoon in the 2nd round of the ACC Tournament. But, how we got to this point has not been a story that’s delivered a promise of a tournament run.
Dating back to February 13, where Georgia Tech lost to Clemson in a game where they didn’t play at their usual level. A bye into the second round was essentially guaranteed, sitting at 8-5 in conference play with a chance at one of the better seeds for the ACC Tournament to potentially avoid playing top ACC teams Notre Dame or NC State in a potential third round game. Up to then, Tech was still on track to have one of it’s best, if not the best, regular season in program history.
Instead, the team we saw in the front half of the year that went 15-0 and climbed up the AP rankings went from one of the most lethal ACC teams to one bullied and bruised by the end of the ACC schedule.
Following a nine point win over Wake Forest to rebound from the Clemson loss, Tech had one of their essential stretches of the season: vs. NC State, vs. Florida State, @ California, @ Stanford. While NC State and Florida State were going to be very tough competition, Tech drew them at home, one of their best advantages on paper to signify a leap forward for the program, and for potentially favorable seeding in the NCAA Tournament.
How did it go? Against NC State, Tech got fully overwhelmed during a 17-0 scoring run by the Wolfpack, securing that loss. Florida State was down Ta’Niya Latson (who had never scored less than 30 points against Tech) and O’Mariah Gordon, who combine for 42.6 points per game, yet had no answer for Sydney Bowles and couldn’t come up clutch late in a 73-70 loss. Tech slipped closer to the edge of the teams who would get an ACC Tournament first round bye.
With the California swing next, getting one win to avoid a four game losing streak was desperately needed. Against Cal, Tech looked overmatched, shooting under 50% in three of four quarters while the Bears never shot below 50% in any quarter, a continuing trend over the end of the season where Tech was not able to truly contain the best ACC teams defensively.
Against Stanford today, despite Tonie Morgan putting up a career high 31 points on 12 made field goals, Tech repeatedly had to battle out of 10+ point deficits, eventually taking a two point lead in the fourth quarter up 76-74, only to get beat 13-6 the rest of the game and fall 87-82 to the Cardinal. Yes, the offense was there, but Tech was on track to allow 90+ points for most of the game, allowing Stanford to hit 61% of their shots.
The loss moves Tech into 9th below Virginia Tech, who owned the tiebreaker between them and the Jackets due to their 105-94 (2OT) win over Tech on January 9, the first team to beat the Jackets all season. That loss kickstared a 6-9 regular season finish for GT while Virginia Tech went 7-7, beating Clemson by two in their regular season finale.
The 9th place ACC finish is only one position better than 2023-24 where Tech finished 7-11 with 17 total regular season wins. Tech has not finished over .500 in ACC play since 2021-2022, Tech’s last NCAA Tournament team in Lorela Cubaj and Lotta-Maj Lahtinen’s final year at Tech.
As of February 28th, Charlie Creme’s NCAA tournament projections had Tech as a 9-seed in Columbia, South Carolina, arguably one of the worst draws for any team.
As a fan, seeing this late season slide is so painful knowing they had the potential to do what few Tech teams have ever done. Today’s performance by Tonie Morgan is emblematic of it. They are well coached, have incredible talent, can utilize different starting lineups for different needs, and ultimately could shoot well. In conference play, Tech finished 7th in scoring margin at only +3.2 points per game, a very different story compared to games 1-15 for the Jackets.
The good news is that the ACC Tournament allows another guaranteed opportunity to make our lives better in the NCAA Tournament. Obviously a deep run would be incredible and more closely align with what this team can do. I think what we learned this year is that even if Tech has reached a different level of play for themselves, that growth needs to be faster relative to how fast the ACC talent pool is growing. Coach Fortner often notes just how difficult it is to win in the ACC when her team runs into disappointing or close losses, but in the end it’s the win column that matters most.