The No. 5 Michigan women’s basketball team is full of players who committed to do something special, something that’s never been done before. The Wolverines’ ultimate goal is to hang banners, hoisting the first Big Ten and national championship trophies in program history.
Thursday night in a 9,575-fan season opener with a monumental 77-66 win over No. 2 Connecticut, Michigan beat a top-four team for the first time in program history and established itself as a top-four team nationally.
“It certainly
feels like a statement win,” head coach Kim Barnes Arico said postgame. “Like I talked about, UConn is one of the best. I was in the Big East before I was in the Big Ten and I had to play against them at least one time every year. So for the past however long it’s been, 35, 40 years, they’ve been the team to beat. They’ve been the best of the best. They have the number one player in the nation on their team. So if you can get a victory against an incredible, incredible program like that, I think that’s definitely a statement win.”
Michigan’s been building to this moment since Barnes Arico arrived. Her 14 years at the helm have seen her transform the program from a Big Ten bottom-feeder into a title contender. She’s the winningest basketball coach in Michigan history. The 2025-26 team set or tied program records for wins in a season and highest March Madness seed (No. 2) en route to the program’s second Elite Eight.
The 2026-27 team, now 1-0, owns the biggest regular season win in program history. Doing it against the second-ranked Huskies, a perennial power and premier program, elevates them to the top tier contenders this year, among No. 1 South Carolina and No. 3 Southern California.
Perhaps even more special, the Wolverines made history by playing true to their historic identity as a program that Barnes Arico has cultivated year after year.
Being the “hardest-working team in America” has been Michigan’s mantra for years. Player development is the approach Barnes Arico preaches. Thursday night, the Wolverines out-hustled the Huskies, scoring more fast-break points and forcing more turnovers. They contained reigning National Player of the Year, forward Sarah Strong, to just 13 points. Michigan’s leading scorer was Te’Yala Delfosse, a junior wing starting her second career game, who dropped a career-high 22 points on 4-for-6 three-point shooting that matched her freshman year total output beyond the arc.
That’s Michigan basketball.
The Wolverines, after years of narrowly losing top games because of foul trouble or turnovers, flipped the script against the Huskies and won both those battles. They were more disciplined — Michigan committed 13 fouls to UConn’s 25. The Wolverines turned the ball over 14 times to the Huskies’ 19, limiting live-ball penalties and only surrendering four fast-break points. The fouls weren’t costly, only resulting in 4-for-7 shooting from the free-throw line.
UConn threw its punches. Michigan trailed for more than 10 game minutes, sustaining 14 lead changes. Strong connected for 11 third-quarter points after a scoreless first half, swinging the Huskies back ahead. The 13th lead change, a layup with 8:30 remaining in the fourth quarter giving the Huskies a 57-55 lead, put the Wolverines’ odds of victory at just 30.4 percent, according to ESPN Analytics.
Michigan responded with a game-sealing 8-0 run, including a steal, transition layup, and two Delfosse triples.
Discipline, poise and unshakable confidence. That’s the 2026-27 iteration of Michigan basketball, at least through one game.
Those characteristics are differentiators between the top few teams in the AP Poll and the rest of the top-10. Withstanding opponent runs, matching the fitness level and physicality of play, limiting unforced errors both mental and physical. Looking at Michigan’s previous 0-31 start against top-four teams, those factors separated the Wolverines from being in that top tier of the country. There was a clear distinction between Michigan’s historic No. 2 seed standing in the NCAA Tournament and a 77-41 loss to No. 1 seed Texas in the Elite Eight.
“At the end of the year last year, we really evaluated that Texas game,” Barnes Arico said. “I mean, really, really, really evaluated. And it was the physicality and the handling pressure and getting bumped off the ball, and the decision-making that comes with playing an elite defensive team.”
The Wolverines came back with a crafty coaching plan — at times including a 16-pass no-dribble offensive set against seven defenders to mimic facing top defenses — and a conditioning program to address those shortcomings. In game one of the 2026-27 season, the changes were visible: guards drove straight through UConn’s towering forwards in the paint, they boxed out and scrapped together rebounds, with lean players finishing through contact that might have altered their shots one year ago. Michigan won the second-chance-point battle against the Huskies.
The team the Longhorns defeated in March is gone. This year’s Wolverines are on another level, arguably one that is unprecedented in Michigan women’s basketball history.
“We all improved in different areas that no team can scout, and so they’re gonna look back at last year, but that’s not really going to help them out,” Delfosse said. “They can look at scrimmages, that’s not going to help them out. Because every single day that we go by, we’re getting better. I mean, we had hard practices that coach put us in. The intensity was just high, and so we build off those and we get better every single day.”
Opponents can scout the UConn game, and while it won’t show glaring weaknesses other than a 14-for-24 free throw performance, it will showcase Michigan basketball. Playing with pace, the Wolverines had multidimensional contributions. They imposed their will in a 2-3 zone, forcing turnovers and jumping on loose balls.
“We were able to play Michigan basketball,” Barnes Arico said. “We talk about toughness. We talk about grit. We talk about rebounding. … It’s not about making shots — and obviously it is about making shots, you got to put points on the board to win — but it’s the other things that you do. And (senior guard Dallas Loughridge) took a charge on the spin of Popovic, I think twice. Those are really big game-changing plays, and the momentum swung in the second quarter when we really locked in and did things the Michigan way.”
The unselfish play reaped massive dividends Thursday night. With the young season’s biggest win so far under its belt, the Wolverines are poised for a jump in the AP Poll to their highest-ever ranking. The history-making junior class is en route to more, and the UConn win shows they’re just getting started, with all of their big goals — Big Ten and national championships — intact.
