™One game in, and the 2026-27 season has already done what preseason polls never could: it has made the favorite look mortal, the comeback story look real, and a freshman nobody had circled look like the first upset of the year. South Carolina survived Paris. JuJu Watkins survived her first game back. Oklahoma made the first real statement of the season. And the team that looked most comfortable of all might be the one nobody is talking about yet.
Paris was supposed to be a coronation. It was a warning
No. 1 South Carolina beat No. 20 Maryland 101-93 on Monday, and if you only saw the final score you'd think it was routine. It wasn't. The Gamecocks led 33-14 after a quarter and 61-33 at half-time. Then Maryland guard Addi Mack happened: a career-high 35 points, six threes, and a second half in which a 28-point lead turned into a genuine contest. Joyce Edwards answered with 23 points and eight rebounds, and South Carolina held on, but Dawn Staley will not have enjoyed a single minute of that second half.
Here's the thing about that game: it's the best thing that could have happened to the Gamecocks. A 30-point cruise in Paris teaches a team nothing. Nearly blowing a 28-point lead to a ranked opponent teaches it everything about what its defense looks like when the intensity drops. South Carolina is still the right No. 1. It's just no longer a No. 1 that can coast, and the schedule doesn't let it: Clemson and North Carolina are next, then the Ally Tipoff on Sunday.
And give Maryland its due. Losing by eight after trailing by 28 is not a moral victory — it's a scouting report. Mack is a problem for every defense in the Big Ten, and the Terps just proved they can score with anybody. They'll be ranked higher by December than they are now.
JuJu is back, and the number that matters isn't 21
JuJu Watkins played her first game since March 2025 on Monday, and USC beat UNLV 100-68 in Las Vegas. She scored 21 points on 9-for-22 shooting, grabbed five rebounds, and put up 11 in the third quarter as the Trojans pulled away 31-10. Good numbers. Not the number that matters.
The number that matters is 22 — the points freshman Saniyah Hall scored in her debut. And 23, from Jazzy Davidson. Watkins doesn't have to be the whole offense anymore, and that is the entire point of this USC season. Last year the Trojans were a one-woman show with a title ceiling set by one woman's knee. This year the supporting cast scored 45 points around her in game one, and the best player in the country gets to ease back instead of carrying the program on a surgically repaired ACL.
That's the optimistic reading. The cautious one: Watkins shot 9-for-22, which is exactly what a rusty superstar looks like, and USC's real test isn't UNLV. It's November 15, at South Carolina, on ABC. Circle it. We'll know then whether the comeback is complete.
The first upset belongs to a freshman
Oklahoma 91, North Carolina 79, in Paris. The Sooners beat the No. 12 Tar Heels despite early foul trouble for star Aaliyah Chavez, and the reason was freshman LeeLee Bell, who scored 25 points in her college debut. Read that again: a freshman, in her first game, in a foreign arena, against a ranked team, while her team's star sat with fouls. That's not a nice debut. That's a statement.
Oklahoma was No. 21 in the preseason poll. It won't be No. 21 for long. North Carolina, meanwhile, has a problem that one loss doesn't define but does expose: Kate Harpring has the ball in her hands for a top-15 team, and the Tar Heels' margin for error just got thinner. They get South Carolina on Sunday at the Ally Tipoff. No gentle rebuild there.
UConn did what UConn does, and that's the scary part
UConn 100, Cornell 35. A 21-0 run in the first quarter. Fifty-five per cent from the field. Sarah Strong, the returning national player of the year, with 19 points and eight steals. Freshman Jovana Popovic with 19 points of her own. Thirty-one consecutive season-opening wins.
The question from October was whether UConn has a second scorer it trusts when a game gets tight, with no Azzi Fudd anymore. One game against Cornell answers nothing — and yet Popovic scoring 19 in her debut is exactly the kind of nothing that turns into something by January. The Huskies don't play a ranked team until Louisville on November 15, so enjoy the blowouts while they last. The real exam comes later in the month: Duke at TD Garden on November 28.
Rome belonged to Hidalgo — and to a debut nobody saw coming
A day before Paris, No. 13 Notre Dame opened the season in Rome with a 99-75 win over Villanova, and Hannah Hidalgo did what Hannah Hidalgo does: 32 points, eight assists, seven rebounds, three steals, her 18th career 30-point game, in the first regular-season college game ever played in Rome. But the story of that game might be sophomore Leah Macy, who debuted with 27 points and 14 rebounds and helped Notre Dame win a rebounding battle it lost most of last season. The Irish shot 56 per cent and outscored Villanova 50-32 in the paint. That's a team that fixed its weakness in one offseason.
Notre Dame at No. 13 was always the ranking that looked most wrong in the preseason poll. After Rome, it looks more wrong. The Irish are a top-10 team playing dress-up as a top-15 team, and the poll will catch up by next Monday.
Elsewhere on opening night
No. 7 Louisville set a program record with 119 points against Bellarmine, opening on a 23-0 run. No. 9 LSU hung 129 on Southeastern Louisiana. No. 8 Vanderbilt beat Lipscomb 112-53. No. 10 Iowa handled Towson 73-45 behind Dani Carnegie's 21 points, five rebounds and five assists — and freshman McKenna Woliczko's debut is still to come into focus. Defending champion UCLA, No. 11, pulled away from Lehigh 73-53 behind Sienna Betts' 15 points and seven rebounds: workmanlike, not frightening, which is about right for a team that lost six players to the WNBA. No. 25 NC State beat Wofford 80-50, with Zoe Brooks scoring 23 and Khamil Pierre adding a 15-point, 11-rebound double-double.
The blowouts tell you little. The close games tell you everything. And this week, the close games told us the top of the sport is more crowded than the poll suggests.
What to watch next
Sunday, November 8, the Ally Tipoff in Charlotte: No. 14 Kentucky vs. No. 25 NC State at 3 p.m. ET on ESPN2, then No. 1 South Carolina vs. No. 12 North Carolina at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN. That's the game of the weekend — the Gamecocks' defense against a Tar Heels team with something to prove after Paris.
Then the date that will define November: Sunday, November 15. No. 3 USC vs. No. 1 South Carolina at 1 p.m. on ABC, followed by No. 2 UConn at No. 7 Louisville at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN. Two top-10 games in one afternoon, and by the end of it we'll know whether the preseason top three is a real hierarchy or a polite fiction. My guess: it isn't a hierarchy. It's a traffic jam, and the first crash is coming sooner than anyone thinks.
The pick
Last week I said the champion wouldn't come from the preseason top three, and I narrowed it to Duke, Texas or LSU. One game in, I'll hold that — but I'll add a name to the watchlist. Oklahoma just beat a top-15 team with a freshman leading the way and its star in foul trouble. That's not a fluke profile. That's a March profile. The Sooners are the team to watch this month, and if they beat another ranked team before Thanksgiving, the conversation about this season changes completely.
Women's Sports Now's college hoops column runs weekly through the season — before tip-off, after the buzzer, and everything in between.