Jazzy Davidson faces her toughest test yet 

Davidson is doing her best to fill the AP-player-of-the-year-sized void felt by the Trojans amid JuJu Watkins’ ACL injury and recovery. She’s shown flashes of brilliance and a consistent athleticism that makes her difficult to match up with, demonstrating why she was the top overall recruit in her class coming out of high school.  

Ahead of the game, UConn Head Coach Geno Auriemma was asked about Davidson’s play to-date, noting that she’s done her best to play a similar role to Watkins: a floor leader who is consistent across statistical categories.

“She’s really stamped herself on that team,” Auriemma said. “She’s probably the best freshman in the country at this point, based on what has happened on the court. […] I think she’s everything that she was advertised to be.” 

Sarah Strong, UConn’s dominant sophomore who herself won WBCA freshman of the year last year, echoed her coach’s sentiment leading up to the matchup. “She’s a great scorer, has a great IQ, and just knows what to do,” Strong said. 

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But the UConn game last weekend demonstrated the flaws in Davidson’s game, reminding fans that she’s still a freshman. But with the experience she’ll get leading a team like USC, who last year relied on a similarly dominant force, she’s in a good position to make improvements and be something even more impactful down the line. 

“In her first ten games, she’s played two top three teams,” USC head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said following the game. “Definitely not the easy route. It’s not ‘get-yourself-used-to-college-basketball-teams,’ you know, where we’re just superior. But I think that’s great for her. I think her mentality is a competitive one. I think she’s the focal point, in a lot of ways, of another team’s scout.”

In the matchup with the Huskies, Davidson had to work harder for buckets than she had all season, fighting through a scoreless first quarter and being face-guarded by Azzi Fudd, who shadowed her amid a suffocating UConn full court press. Davidson made up for it on the defensive end, with her length affording her two early blocks and a few deflections. She carried that momentum into a heavily-contested floater in the second quarter that finally broke her scoring seal; from there, Davidson was at very least able to get a few more shots up, something that had proved challenging through the first 12 minutes of play. 

As a freshman, getting shots up on a team like UConn is a challenge — Davidson was no doubt facing a bigger, stronger and faster defense than any she’s encountered before. While her shots still did not fall (she went 1-7 to start the game), she looked more in-rhythm and more aggressive as the game played on.

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By halftime, her stat line told the story of a player working hard despite offensive inefficiency: 2 points on 1-7 shooting, 3 blocks, 1 rebound, 1 steal, and, crucially, zero turnovers — a feat for a team that finished the game with 19. She was doing her best to make it up on the defensive end, fighting in ways that don’t always show up in the box score. 

This game showed what happens when the best freshman in the country meets the sport’s most storied program on their biggest stage. By the time Davidson hit double digits, it felt like each singular point had been her personal effort to claw back against elite competition that had game-planned specifically to shut her down.

“She’s super skilled, she knows how to score at all three levels,” said Fudd after the game, acknowledging the film that she’d studied and the way she’d prepared with her coaches to guard the star. 

“She’ll keep getting better,” Gottlieb said after the game. “I think she takes it on like a competitor. I think her motor never stops. She wants to make the right play every time. That’s obviously not always going to happen, but she’s got teammates around her that believe in her, and, you know, she’s only going to get better from having these experiences this early in her career.” 

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