​Officials are never as flawless as we hope, and after the game they’re rarely as bad as we feared. This piece of caution, a mindset Geno Auriemma says he absorbed early in his storied coaching run with the UConn women’s program, was put to the test in the third quarter of this year’s national semifinal against South Carolina, when the Gamecocks went the entire period without drawing a single foul. In the moment, Auriemma’s anger bubbled up, he blasted the Final Four officiating crew during a sideline chat with ESPN’s Holly Rowe, and his reaction helped fuel a heated postgame clash with Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley.
Yet even with the passage of time, Auriemma remains laden with grievances about how that NCAA Tournament exit was officiated. He contends that the three-person crew— Brenda Pantoja, Fatou Cissoko-Stephens, and Katie Lukanich—was not qualified to handle a game of such magnitude. “We’ve got lots of officials, and three of them were in that semifinal—really not up to the standard they should have been at the level of that game, based on how they’re rated,” Auriemma said in a conversation with journalist Richard Deitsch on his Sports Media podcast. “People get jobs, and you wonder why.”
The “ratings” he references are internal evaluation systems used by conferences and the NCAA to grade officials and assign the top performers to the most consequential regular-season and tournament games. Those ratings aren’t made public. Two of the officials came into the matchup with recent Final Four exposure: Pantoja had previously refereed South Carolina’s semifinal win over Texas, while Lukanich was assigned to UConn’s 71–69 loss to Iowa two years earlier. Cissoko-Stephens, meanwhile, had not officiated a Final Four before and earned her first assignment beyond the Sweet 16 in 2025.
In the game itself, the Huskies—who had entered with a flawless record and historically efficient offense—stumbled to a 62–48 defeat, shooting a mere 31 percent from the floor against South Carolina. Auriemma likened the affair to the hard-hitting, physical playoff battles between the Philadelphia Flyers and the New York Rangers in 1980s hockey. Still, he moved beyond his grievance with the individual referees to lament a broader preference for brutal, unsettled physical play that tethers offensive flow and success.
“Those officials have a tough job, obviously, but they’re basically calling the game the way they’re directed to,” Auriemma said. “People treat showing how physical you can be as a badge of honor—like, ‘See how tough our game is, see how physical it is.’ That’s nonsense. You can’t play like that.”