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  • Swanson: Will anyone challenge UCLA women’s basketball? Certainly not Maryland

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UCLA forward Angela Dugalić, left, and UCLA guard Gianna Kneepkens, box out Maryland guard Oluchi Okananwa (7) on the free throw line during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jayne Kamin-Oncea)

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LOS ANGELES – Gotta confess, I was rooting for Maryland.

Not to beat UCLA, no. But to keep it close, Sunday afternoon. To present some sort of a challenge. A little thrill.

I was hoping the No. 12 Terrapins might provide some semblance of suspense for the 8,721 fans who spent their afternoon at Pauley Pavilion, watching the No. 3 Bruins women’s basketball team wear down the guests in another successful yawner, 97-67.

The Bruins went into halftime with 10 turnovers and still had 47 points and a 12-point lead. The inevitable result was right on par with the 29.7-point differential UCLA was winning with entering play.

That’s why I was pulling for what was, on paper, UCLA’s most allegedly daunting Big Ten test to actually be a test – for UCLA’s own sake – and not another predictable outcome for which the Bruins came prepared with all the answers.

But Maryland wasn’t up for that. Now 17-3 this season, the Terps were no match for UCLA, which won its 11th consecutive to improve to 17-1, 7-0 in the Big Ten. The Bruins’ only loss was to No. 4 Texas – almost a favor, as a most-valuable early-season point of motivation.

Since then, though? The Bruins have been obliterating everyone they’ve faced. Because they’re that much better than everyone they’ve faced.

Talented and balanced. Selfless and in sync. Loaded with future WNBA draft picks. Bought in, locked in, laser-focused – fresh off a Final Four run and, with more experience and a couple significant upgrades, wanting better than for this season’s foray to stop again in the national semifinal.

UCLA is one of the nation’s top scoring teams (86.4) and one of its better defensive squads, too (56.7). The Bruins have the nation’s third-best assist-to-turnover ratio. They’re out-rebounding opponents by almost 16 boards per game, second-best nationally.

“This is another Final Four team,” Maryland coach Brenda Frese said. “With the opportunity to go win a national championship. They have been very intentional this year; they have the right chemistry. They’re gonna be right there. This is a national contender.”

The Bruins have arrived. Firmly among the upper crust of women’s basketball. Right there with perennial powers No. 1 Connecticut and No. 2 South Carolina, with regular contenders LSU and Texas, ranked Nos. 4 and 6 this past week.

It’s just that UConn, say, has decades of experience playing from the front. South Carolina and some of these other traditionally tip-top-tier teams have for years now dialed in a formula for staying in the moment while they annihilate opponents by 30 points or 35 or 38 or 44, as they are, while also playing for March.

This isn’t, however, regularly chartered territory for a UCLA program that’s steadily ascended to get here.

And the next time they face a foe that’s truly formidable, it will be in a game with supremely high stakes, probably deep into the NCAA Tournament. And so I worry about how the Bruins will stay sharp for when they run into their fellow buzzsaws.

Their conference isn’t helping. It might boast eight ranked teams, but as far as the Bruins are concerned, it’s the Big Ten in name only: There are 18 teams in the league, for starters, and compared to UCLA, this season they’re all too small, in basketball trash-talk parlance.

Across town, rival USC is young and floundering without star guard JuJu Watkins, out for the season recovering from a torn ACL. And any other conference opponent who was supposed to issue a challenge – ahem, Maryland – has failed.

So, yes, the Terrapins, with five freshmen in their rotation, will learn plenty from the loss: “When we face this again, we’re going to be more prepared for it,” senior guard Saylor Poffenbarger said. “This is only going to prepare [us] for the games in March that are really important.”

But what about the Bruins? Who’s preparing them? Or, who beside Close and her staff: “That,” she said, “is my largest responsibility this year.”

And, she said, “honestly, it’s exhausting. I have to just get myself ready [to get on them about] every little thing. I’m just on ’em, on ’em, on ’em! But I know that I can do that and do that consistently because I know what they really want.”

That’s to win a national championship, of course.

And if the Bruins aren’t going to get mettle-testing help from their opponents, if no one is going to force them to have to finish off a close game, they’re learning that preparation for those pressure-packed moments will have to come from within.

“It’s something we talk about every day,” said savvy senior point guard Charlisse Leger-Walker, who finished with 17 points, nine rebounds and eight assists Sunday.

“When you are part of such a great team, it can be easy to be complacent. It can be easy to come in and not fight for every possession, to not fight for your stance on defense when you’re just going through the motions.

“Our coaches do a really good job of holding the standard in that way, and also my teammates. We’re a veteran group, we have a lot of experience, a lot of leadership and when we feel like things are starting to slip in training, we have one through five people ready to say something about it.”

Maybe that’s what it will take, for them to be their own hardest critics – in practice, and at practice, which is what UCLA’s games have become: Reps for the real thing.

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Mirjam Swanson

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  • Swanson: Rams QB Matthew Stafford’s best is more than good enough

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    Quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) of the Rams prepares to pass against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the second half of a NFL football game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on Sunday, November 23, 2025. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

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    INGLEWOOD — Just came here to say: Matthew Stafford > Drake Maye for MVP.

    Stafford >  Jonathan Taylor.

    Stafford > everyone.

    There’s no one doing it like the Rams’ 37-year-old, 17th-year QB, who doesn’t want to label it this way himself, but who is, in fact, playing the best football the best of his long, illustrious career.

    He’s playing the best football in the whole wide world, and it’s a pretty incredible – and incredibly pretty – sight. Not that any defender should believe those lying eyes of Stafford’s.

    Not the way side-arming, no-look-passing Showtime signal-caller is slinging it.

    The state of the Rams? Flow.

    In rhythm.

    Hurrying up right out of the gate again in their 34-7 Sunday Night statement over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (6-5) before a record crowd of 75,545 at SoFi Stadium.

    All of the Rams (9-2) are in the zone, but none more than Stafford. His three touchdowns Sunday came in the first half, when the now-top-seed-in-the-NFC Rams were “in total command and control,” coach Sean McVay said. They went into halftime with a 31-7 lead to nourish and protect, and they did so, much as the Rams’ offensive line has been shielding their QB.

    Stafford’s three TD passes – if you were counting, and I hope you were – were his 25th, 26th and 27th without an interception. Rarefied air beneath those tosses, which put him in the company of only Tom Brady.

    Stafford also became the NFL’s ninth QB – and the first since Brady (in 2021, with Tampa Bay) – with at least 30 touchdown passes in his team’s first 11 contests.

    And Stafford now has thrown at least two passing touchdowns in each of his past five games, which, yes, is the longest streak in the league.

    In just his past eight games, Stafford has thrown 25 touchdowns without a pick, and he’s thrown for 2,091 yards while completing 66.5% of his passes. His 308 consecutive attempts without an interception is, all of the above: the longest streak of his career, the longest in the NFL this season and the longest in Rams history.

    “Ahh, I’m not trying to label it,” Stafford said. “I just know I’m having fun.”

    His story this dream season just keeps delivering history. Don’t pinch him, don’t wake him up, don’t disturb the man, who surely could not have imagined such sublime production nine months ago.

    In February, remember, we weren’t sure whether Stafford would still be quarterbacking the Rams, let alone piloting them back into championship contention, with a real chance to deliver an encore following the Super Bowl LVI championship they won with Stafford leading the way four seasons ago.

    In February, the team had given Stafford the OK to shop his services elsewhere before both sides reconvened to rework his deal and keep him here, where he belongs.

    Neither he – nor we – could have predicted this monumental display four months ago, when training camp opened without Stafford, who was shelved with an aggravated disc in his back.

    Or even three months ago, when he stepped on the field in Week 1 of the regular season against Houston without having taken a hit since the previous season, without having completed any game reps with new star receiver Davante Adams, without knowing how his body, another year older, would hold up.

    “My situation during training camp with the injury that I was going through and not being able to really do much of anything for about four to six weeks … sometimes being without something lets you know how much you really love doing it,” Stafford said. “And I love playing this game.”

    And it’s loving him back. Talk about creating a most valuable narrative. Talk about what an MVP award could mean for the Hall of Fame argument in favor a two-time Pro Bowler and no-time All-Pro pick whose best finish in MVP voting was eighth, in 2023 – a future campaign on which Rams linebacker Jared Verse Talk has already ruled: “first-ballot.”

    Talk about 10/10, no notes – or, on Sunday, 12 for his first 12, a career-best-tying start to a game for the former No. 1 pick out of Georgia.

    If Stafford were a pitcher like his buddy Clayton Kershaw, the strike zone would look like the ocean. If he were a batter, he’d be swinging at beach balls. A basketball player? The cylinder would be at least as big as a hula hoop.

    As it is, he’s a quarterback making the NFL look like child’s play, as though he’s having a casual catch with his pals in the backyard.

    And he’s feeding all of those friends well, too; eight Rams receivers could give thanks for passes caught Sunday – including Adams, whose touchdown catches of 1 and 24 yards brought his total for the season to 11, the most by a first-year Ram, surpassing Bucky Pope’s 10 in 1964.

    “It’s just repetition being the mother of learning, those guys just continuing to work together,” McVay said of the Rams’ new productive pairing. “Two great players that are just accumulating experience in the midst of this season.”

    It’s just how things go, Stafford said, all aw-shucks and shrugs Sunday.

    “I’m trying to do the best I can at putting the ball where it needs to go,” he said. “Not putting it in harm’s way but also … taking chances when we’ve got opportunities. Because we got great skill players out there, and I gotta give those guys chances.

    “It’s just … trying to do the best I can.”

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    Mirjam Swanson

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  • Swanson: We won’t forget about Blue Jays’ Trey Yesavage

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    LOS ANGELES — “Put me up against two grizzly bears and I’m not afraid,” Trey Yesavage said at the MLB Draft in July 2024.

    Put me up against a $148 million lineup twice and I’m not afraid – Trey Yesavage, probably, before facing the Dodgers’ star-studded lineup in either of his World Series starts.

    The second-youngest pitcher to start in a World Series (22 years and 88 days for Game 1 last week), and a pitcher with poise beyond his years, he’s either too young to know any better or he was built for this.

    Probably the latter.

    But it begs the question: Who the heck is this new kid who made $57,204 in MLB money this season? Who is this dude who really might have spoiled the Dodgers’ plan to further “ruin” baseball with a second consecutive World Series title with their big, fat payroll?

    Who is this newcomer who just shut down the Dodgers and led the Toronto Blue Jays to a 6-1 victory in Game 5 to give them them a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series before it heads back north?

    Let me introduce you to the fellow you won’t soon forget. The one who Dodgers’ hitters might have nightmares about when this series is said and done.

    Because someday, I’ll bet, we’ll all look back on Wednesday not so much as an abject failure by the best lineup money can buy, but as a coronation. A coming-out party. An official introduction to baseball’s next big thing.

    Yesavage might not fear anything, but from now on opposing hitters will probably be very, very afraid of him.

    The 6-foot-4 right-hander is from Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Son of Cheryl and Dave Yesavage – perhaps you spotted them on TV going nuts Wednesday at Dodger Stadium watching their son shine, unfazed, on the biggest of stages? With his electric slider and splitter, he struck out a dozen hitters, more than any rookie pitcher in World Series history, including the former record-holder, Brooklyn Dodger Don Newcombe, who sat down 11 in Game 1 of the 1949 World Series.

    Yesavage’s 35 strikeouts in the postseason are the most by a rookie pitcher in major league history.

    Before he capital-A Arrived this postseason, he was one of the best starters in the country at East Carolina. He landed at No. 11 on MLB Pipeline’s pre-Draft rankings before the Blue Jays selected him No. 20 overall in the 2024 MLB Draft.

    His meteoric ascent through the minor-league ranks this year – with pit stops at all four full-season levels, hitting Class-A, High-A, Double-A and Triple-A, before making his major league debut on Sept. 15 at Tampa Bay – was steeper than the arm angle with which he delivers pitches. And that’s the highest arm slot of any right-hander in the playoffs this year.

    On Wednesday, the young man mowed through the Dodgers’ spectacular but spectacularly slumping lineup, turning his fifth postseason start – and just his eighth major league start – into where-were-you-when baseball history.

    The Dodgers couldn’t touch him. Yesavage notched a ridiculous 46.2 whiff%, recording 23 swings and misses – the most by a pitcher in a World Series game since pitch tracking became a thing in 2008.

    Through just five innings, he had struck out every Dodger at least once – including twisting Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers’ resident regular history maker, into a pretzel at the plate.

    Deadpanned Blue Jays manager John Schneider: “He was pretty good.”

    Actually, seriously though, Schneider said: “Kind of blown away at what he did.”

    Yeah, pretty good at blowing away the Dodgers too.

    The Dodgers who knew what was at stake Wednesday and had plans to take advantage of the youngster who they had faced in their Game 1 defeat.

    Before the game, first baseman Freddie Freeman told reporters, “we already faced Trey once, so hopefully we can have the same plan. I thought we did a pretty good job against him in Game 1 getting him out after four innings.”

    Unfortunately for Freeman – who struck out three times – and the rest of the Dodgers, Yesavage had his own plans.

    He also was relishing the chance to face them again.

    “I’m able to collect my thoughts and see what adjustments I need to make between outing to outing,” he said. “So it almost makes it – I won’t say easier, but I have a better plan going into the game …”

    And he had this other plan, too: “Walking from the bullpen to the dugout [before the game], I took a moment to look around the stadium, see all the fans I wanted to – I was hoping I would send ’em home upset.”

    No moment too big, no opponent to vicious.

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    Mirjam Swanson

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  • Swanson: Only something truly substantial could knock these Dodgers off course

    Swanson: Only something truly substantial could knock these Dodgers off course

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    LOS ANGELES — You know it’s going to take something truly and seriously substantial to knock these Dodgers off track.

    Something much more than, say, miscommunication in the outfield. More than a Mookie Betts error. A Betts day off. More than Freddie Freeman hitting .295 instead of .300-something. More than a season-long Chris Taylor conundrum.

    More any bobblehead-induced hassle to dim the vibe at Dodger Stadium, where on Sunday the majority of the announced sellout crowd of 52,656 was still here to witness Shohei Ohtani’s first walk-off hit with his new team in a 3-2, 10-inning victory over the Cincinnati Reds.

    It’ll take much more than Sunday’s badly defended bunt to slow these Dodgers, who remain on a regular ol’ regular-season roll, winners of 20 of their past 26 games. They’re 32-17 and eight games ahead of the second-place San Diego Padres in the National League West standings.

    It’ll take more to slow this roll than a stellar outing from L.A. native Hunter Greene, the Reds’ hard-throwing hurler who is coming into his own after being selected No. 2 overall in 2017 out of Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High. The right-hander held the Dodgers to two runs in 6⅓ innings on Sunday, but it takes more than that to beat them. This time of year, it does.

    More even than a rotating bullpen door, with 18 relievers having walked through in fewer than 50 games so far – including Anthony Banda, the newest guy.

    The 30-year-old left-hander – acquired Friday from the Cleveland Guardians on Friday for cash – met Manager Dave Roberts a few hours before Sunday’s matinee. You can learn “a lot about a player and a person,” Roberts said after he’d plugged in Banda with a game in the balance, insisting he walk out there onto the hot coals in the 10th inning with Elly De La Cruz revving at second base – where the Reds’ furiously fast extra-inning free runner stayed.

    Because Banda went and retired the side in order, setting the table for Ohtani.

    “It’s obviously elite players here … but it’s just trusting your stuff,” said Banda, bespectacled and impressively tattooed. “The first message they told me, ‘Hey, be yourself here. We got you for a reason, we love you.’ So that broke the ice for me, and I went out there and did my thing.”

    The Sho goes on, I guess you could say.

    Or perhaps: “SHO’S OVER, GO HOME” (@Dodgers); “A SHO STOPPER” (@MLB); “It’s Sho-ver” (@Wittman7). Or, as Lupe Fiasco raps every time Ohtani approaches the plate here: “Just remember when you come up, the show goes on …”

    And the Dodgers’ winning machine chugs on, immune to bumps in the road, headwinds or hiccups. For more mortal clubs, molehills might as well be mountains. Murphy’s Law, what can go wrong, will. (Ask Ohtani’s old club.)

    For the deep and talented and collected Dodgers, it’s the opposite. What can go wrong … will not even matter. Not this time of year.

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    Mirjam Swanson

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  • Swanson: UCLA and LSU put on a show worth talking about

    Swanson: UCLA and LSU put on a show worth talking about

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    ALBANY, N.Y. — What’s your opinion of Kim Mulkey? I bet you have one.

    And it might not be favorable. Shoot, odds are it isn’t. But odds are you know who she is.

    You can’t miss her; she’s the sequined-out lady on the sideline, though rarely just toeing the line. And she’s been in the game for decades; she went 130-6 as a Louisiana Tech player and reached the Final Four every year before going on to become coach, since becoming the only person to lead two programs to national titles, including last season, when she did it with these LSU Tigers.

    On Saturday, she coached a Sweet 16 game against No. 2 seed UCLA. Her third-seeded Tigers out-executed the Bruins down the stretch to win 78-69 in a thrilling opening act at MVP Arena, where most of the sold-out crowd was there to see Caitlin Clark and Iowa knock out Colorado 89-68 afterward.

    That sets up a rematch. The rematch. A sequel of last season’s NCAA women’s basketball championship game. It drew a record 9.9 million viewers and was, as far as I can think, the biggest women’s sports moment in America since the U.S. women’s national soccer team won the 1999 World Cup at the Rose Bowl on Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick.

    Last season’s title game was so riveting, so rousing, so needing to be debated that its ripple effects gave women’s basketball in L.A. a boost. It was like a brilliant bounce pass to JuJu Watkins and her Elite Eight-bound USC squad and to Cori Close and her talented Bruins, too.

    Those teams did their own heavy lifting, to be certain, upholding their part of the bargain by going 26-5 and 25-6, respectively, USC winning the Pac-12 title and UCLA spending the season in the top 10 nationally.

    Their head-to-head games in L.A. drew a record 10,657 at Galen Center and a women’s record 13,659 fans at Pauley Pavilion in some part because of the groundwork laid by Iowa and LSU – women’s basketball is a thing!

    And now, with a couple more Pac-12 schools out of the way, LSU and Iowa are going to tango again Monday in an Elite Eight matchup that feels a lot like it should be a Final Four matchup – much like how UCLA’s entanglement with LSU also felt like it coulda been.

    Like it woulda definitely been elite Elite Eight theater.

    And like it probably shoulda gone UCLA’s way, if not for a pivotal sequence of events down the stretch, when the Bruins’ 67-64 lead with 2:46 to play unraveled as they missed layups and free throws and LSU made its layups and free throws.

    “I’m gonna say we’re the better team, we just didn’t show up today,” said center Lauren Betts, one of six sophomores on what remains a promising if unfulfilled Bruins team that will be better for this experience, as much as it stinks and stings.

    Despite UCLA’s consistently high billing all season, it was placed in the NCAA Tournament’s version of the “Group of Death.” They’d had to travel farthest to get here. Plus their plane was delayed en route, and they then had the earliest practice time Thursday, at what was, for their West Coast clocks, 4 a.m.

    No excuses, Close said.

    “We had this under our control,” she said. “We could have not been in Albany, but we lost some (regular-season) games we shouldn’t have.”

    UCLA came into the season ranked No. 4, got as high as No. 2 and finished the regular season at No. 6 – before bowing out in the Sweet 16 for the fifth time in Close’s 13-year UCLA tenure, when the Bruins have reached the Elite Eight only in 2018.

    “I’m the head coach. I’m responsible,” she said. “They’re young; I need to lead them in to situations where they have the confidence so we execute in those scenarios.”

    As Close dutifully fell on her sword, Mulkey sharpened hers, turning another newspaper story into the story postgame.

    A couple hours before tipoff, the Washington Post published the nearly 7,000-word piece that had been hotly anticipated since Mulkey brought attention to it during a recent news conference, predicting what turned out to be an in-depth and balanced profile would be a hit piece.

    This time, she ripped a Los Angeles Times article that portrayed her team’s matchup against UCLA as a “reckoning” between good versus evil, saying it struck her as “sexist,” “awful” and “wrong” — and taking issue, among other things, with a gendered characterization of the women on her team being “dirty debutantes” and UCLA’s as more “milk and cookies.”

    She was right. They’re all actually hoopers. Competitors. Crazy-tough kids.

    Close could tell you. She took to social media and apologized for re-posting the story, saying she made a mistake and that she only wants to “be a person that is about growing our game and building up the people in it.”

    The Bruins might be less demonstrative than some of their opponents, but UCLA’s Londynn Jones can cast a glare when a deep shot goes down, as she did Saturday. Bruins star Kiki Rice can get chatty. And, no, it surprised no one that LSU’s high-profile stars Angel Reese and Flau’Jae Johnson, respectively, had something to say to a UCLA assistant and the Bruins’ fans – because that’s all part of the show, and it’s a good show!

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    Mirjam Swanson

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