FORT WORTH, Texas — Madison Booker is convinced she bested her head coach in a game of two truths and a lie. And with an audience on social media, no less. But the All-American committed a rare miscue.
None of them were lies. Vic Schaefer catches onto this. He knows everything about his Longhorns and anything related to them.
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He saw the media outlet that made a “bad decision” in believing Rori Harmon would lose the Sweet 16 matchup of Nancy Lieberman Award finalist point guards. He also publicly calls out the idea that his players would overlook an opponent on purpose, when Michigan cites Texas’ “honest mistake” as fuel.
When Texas clinched its berth in the Fort Worth 3 regional on Monday in that win over the Wolverines, Schaefer became the first head coach to reach the Final Four multiple times with multiple teams. He definitely knows how difficult it is to reach the final weekend, a summit he’s peaked at three prior times without finishing the climb.
“That’s, I’m pretty sure, why a lot of people came to Texas,” sophomore guard Jordan Lee told Yahoo Sports. “That’s something he’s been very close to, but hasn’t done yet.”
One-hundredths of a second. That’s how close Schaefer has been to the top.
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His 2018 Mississippi State team lost to Notre Dame on Arike Ogunbowale’s second buzzer-beater in as many games. The year prior, he led the Bulldogs to history by snapping UConn’s 111-game winning streak in the semifinals on an overtime buzzer-beater by Morgan Williams. They couldn’t win the next game.
And last year, Texas couldn’t keep pace with fresh SEC rival South Carolina, the 2017 national title winner over Schaefer, in its first Final Four since 2003.
This group isn’t the same for one major reason.
“We don’t have to live and die with every defensive possession to try to grind out a 61-59 win,” Schaefer said. “We can score.”
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He’s never had this full of an arsenal in his career to pair with the typical elite defensive pressure. It appears, at least from the outside, to be the best team he’s ever led to this point in the season.
“That team is as well-constructed a team as I’ve ever seen in women’s basketball,” Kentucky head coach Kenny Brooks said after the Sweet 16 loss to Texas. “I mean, they just keep bringing them in and out.”
Will they be the ones who finally lift Schaefer to the mountaintop, etching his name into the top echelon of coaches?
Schaefer doesn’t know that one. Yet.
Vic Schaefer celebrates with Rori Harmon and Madison Booker at the end of their dominant Elite Eight win over Michigan. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
(Elsa via Getty Images)
The best of the best?
Schaefer curiously listened to various versions of similar questions over four days in Fort Worth as the home team played hours away from Austin. They won games by an average margin of 29 points, a blistering run after advancing through last year’s two games by a total of 19.
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Is this the best offense you’ve had?
“If it’s not my best offensive team, it’s my second-best offensive team that I’ve ever had,” Schaefer said after a 76-54 drubbing of No. 5 Kentucky in the Sweet 16. “They just have so many weapons that you have to be worried about, and it’s really hard to match.”
The best defense you’ve led?
“Yeah, right now, I mean, they’re playing really well defensively,” Schaefer said after keeping Michigan to a season-low 41 points, shooting 23% from the field. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”
He adds a qualifier to this question: They “might” be the best team he’s had the confidence in to take a scout, turn around and execute it in the tight 36-hour turnaround of an NCAA tournament.
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So, then … is this the best team you’ve ever coached?
Schaefer wasn’t about to send caution to the wind now.
“Could be, yeah,” Schaefer said, understanding what’s to come. “I don’t think there’s any doubt right now they’re playing as good as any team I’ve ever had.”
“You know, they very well could be,” he adds. “They’re certainly the best team I’ve had at Texas, no question.”
Much like Booker’s version of two truths and a lie, it’s difficult to spot one here.
When the stars align
Schaefer knows the best team does not always win a championship. Neither of his Final Four teams at Mississippi State was that, in his estimation. It was the one after, the 2018-19 squad that lost to Sabrina Ionescu’s No. 2-seeded Oregon, 88-84, in the regional final played in nearby Portland.
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“There’s no question in my mind that team would have won the national championship, but sometimes it just — you know, you have a little bad luck,” Schaefer said.
Stringing together elite teams requires stacking talent and recruiting classes, a process Schaefer has excelled at since taking over the Longhorns program ahead of the 2020 season. His first piece of business was signing Harmon, the Houston native he recruited heavily at Mississippi State as his “next great point guard.” But the 10th-ranked recruit leaned toward staying in-state.
Funny how luck can work.
Two years later, Booker announced her commitment to Texas over Duke and Tennessee. The Mississippi native became the fourth McDonald’s All-American to join Schaefer at Texas. She’s won multiple All-American nods, and is the reigning two-time winner of the Cheryl Miller Small Forward of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Naismith.
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“When we got Madison, it really elevated everything, but [Rori] had somebody to be with,” Schaefer said.
That 2023-24 roster with a junior Harmon, Booker and the return of 90% of the team’s offensive output looked in December like it could be the one. Then Harmon, an early National Player of the Year candidate, tore her ACL. Booker moved into point guard duties with Harmon guiding her from the sideline, a coaching decision that has paid dividends in the seasons since.
Harmon returned and played a full season, but not at her best, still recovering from surgery and in a knee brace. She’s a do-it-all guard, despite being undersized, who is tasked with guarding the full length of the court.
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“She picks your ass up at the city limits, and she shows your butt the door when we’re done playing,” Schaefer told ESPN in his latest turn of phrase to describe Harmon this month.
Her numbers aren’t gaudy; it’s her ability to run the offense and defense smoothly in Schaefer’s vision. The fifth-year mini coach dumps the ball off and points toward where it should go next as if she’s the producer of a marionette show of superstars.
“You never know who is going to go off on our team,” Harmon said. “We have so many people that can do so many different things. You cover one person, here comes Jordan Lee or here comes Justice [Carlton]. Go down the line the whole list of teammates.”
The clear top scout is Booker, more efficient and lethal in a season when most coaches will say things really begin to click. She shoots 51.2% on mid-range 2s, where she takes more than half of her attempts, per CBB Analytics. The moment she arrives at the baseline middy, the defense might as well hustle back.
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“You look at Madison Booker, and, I mean, she’s like a mini-KD (Kevin Durant),” Brooks said. “When she rises up, I just shook my head a couple of times.”
Booker doesn’t have to touch the paint, because it’s where Breya Cunningham and Kyla Oldacre live with elite success. Texas wants to pound the paint, leading Michigan head coach Kim Barnes Arico to lament how it all combines to wear a team down.
The Longhorns have little care for the 3-point line (15.1% of points), a critique of Schaefer’s past teams. Now, when he needs them, he has them.
The Longhorns actually aren’t terrible from the line when they take them, shooting 33.8%. Lee is their primary and almost exclusive perimeter target, averaging 5.4 attempts per game. She’s also their most improved, shooting from 5.8 points in 19.7 minutes per game as a reserve to 13.3 points in 31.9 minutes as a starter.
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“Jordan has been special, and I think when you’ve got another wing player like we have with her, other teams now, they can’t just focus on Book (Booker), and they better not take their eye off of Rori,” Schaefer said.
It’s that type of offensive elevation that has lifted this group to a true national title contender, even with one-loss UCLA looming in the semifinal on Friday.
Rori Harmon and Madison Booker elevated the Texas program to the powerhouse it is today. (Photo by Ronald Cortes/Getty Images)
(Ronald Cortes via Getty Images)
Slaying the SEC dragon
It could have unraveled in February. The Longhorns held the prestige of the season, having defeated reigning Final Four participants UCLA and South Carolina on back-to-back days in the Players Era Championship held in Las Vegas in November. They then knocked off North Carolina and Baylor, entering SEC play undefeated.
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Harmon, Booker, Lee, Oldacre, Cunningham and Aaliyah Crump all led individual game’s scoring efforts. The Longhorns could find different ways to win, and lean on their backcourt more than ever before.
“I say this all the time, y’all, you win with guard play, but you win championships with guard play and size,” Schaefer said multiple times last weekend
The SEC is a different beast, and Texas drew the short straw of facing LSU and South Carolina on the road four days apart. They lost both by a total of eight points. The loss to South Carolina was their fourth in six games since Texas entered the SEC in 2024-25.
It reared its head as the hump Schaefer just couldn’t get over. Schaefer won three of their 15 meetings when he was in the conference. It was Dawn Staley and A’ja Wilson’s Gamecocks who defeated Mississippi State in the 2017 national championship game.
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Then, days before the NCAA women’s basketball committee’s first top 16 reveal, Texas lost by 16 to Vanderbilt on Feb. 12. It ultimately dropped them off the No. 1 seed line. Schaefer ripped his team for being soft.
“Me and my teammates say the same thing, that we never want to hear our head coach say that about the team he recruited because we’re so much better than that,” Booker said this week.
They insisted they had heart, and they backed it up. The next morning in practice, it was Booker who took charge.
“Rori was helping a little, but Madison was way different,” Schaefer said. “We had a powwow with me and them. Again, I think how they’ve responded is exactly what I thought they’d do.”
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As in, they haven’t lost since. They rattled off 12 wins by an average margin of 26.5 points. Only two were in single digits; every other was by 17 or more. None of their opponents topped 70 points.
The defensive pressure is a tip in Harmon’s hat.
“Rori said in film, hey, this is our standard,” Booker said. “We want to hold teams to under [60 points]. I feel like the team has listened and they’ve responded and we’ve acted on it.”
None have eclipsed 60 since a 78-61 blowout of South Carolina in the SEC tournament championship that was finished in the first quarter. Schaefer is a more respectable 3-4 in the Texas-South Carolina version of this series, and the win put the Longhorns above the Gamecocks into the No. 3 overall seed, avoiding No. 1 UConn until the final.
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Schaefer began his head coaching career in 1990, five years after Geno Auriemma took the helm at UConn. At Sam Houston in Huntsville, Texas, he was 80-110 in seven seasons at the Southland Conference program. Following a brief stint in Arkansas, the associate coach followed Gary Blair to Texas A&M, where he emerged as the “Secretary of Defense.” They won the 2011 national championship in the program’s first trip to the Final Four.
Taking the job at Texas in 2020 was a return home to Austin. His office is two blocks from the hospital where he was born, a fact he tries to turn into a lie when playing the game with Booker. She sniffs it out quickly. He jokes that the vacant lot is a sign he’s getting old.
He knows what it means to represent Texas. What the history of women’s basketball in this city means. He’s kept legendary coach Jody Conradt close to the program, a dream he made reality when he took the job. She led the Longhorns to their only national title in an undefeated 1986 season and is a top-10 winningest coach in women’s basketball history.
He knows what it means to be “Texas tough,” the way he described his group as he approaches his fourth Final Four, which he can only prepare and pray will be different.
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“This team, they got a chance,” he said. “Yep, they got a chance to be, for sure.”
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