Agree with much of what has already been said, but just wanted to add two more things:
1. Recruiting. This has been rehashed to death, but we haven't had a top 5 recruit since Chiney. I have no idea what recruiting was like in the early 90s, but starting in the early 2000s we had a series of top 5 recruits (I know Wiggins, Appel, Pedersen, Nneka and Chiney were all around top 5; I think Powell was right around 5 too?).
Given the lopsided nature of the women's game, one or two top-5 recruits can be the difference maker. It's notable that UConn's brief "down" period in the early 2010s was at the end of the Moore era and and before the start of the Stewwie/Mo/Tuck era when UConn had its weakest recruiting classes it's had in well over a decade - after Delle Donne transferred, UConn had no top ten recruits in the 2008 or 2009 classes, and, no surprise, UConn failed to take home the national title when those classes were upperclassmen in 2011 and 2012. Armed with three top 6 recruits, UConn then ran off 4 titles in a row.
We've had a few close to top ten (I think McCall was 11, and Beebe was around 11 also but never got to play), but this year we got our first top ten recruit since Chiney in Williams, and Dodson is so close (11) as to be the same. Still, they aren't yet contributing the way Megan Walker (no. 1) at Uconn and Evina Westbrook (no. 2) at Tennessee are.
2. We don't have our star player. McPhee is our leading scorer, go-to playmaker, and was on the regional final all-tournament team and the All-Pac-12 last spring. She's arguably more instrumental to our team than any single player since Cheney, given our lack of upperclass scoring. We've been the lower seed against UConn, Ohio State (x2) and Baylor, and without McPhee, there's even less reason to think we should win those games, all away from home. That doesn't fully explain some soft performances against midling competition, but I think we underestimate her absence.
1. Recruiting. This has been rehashed to death, but we haven't had a top 5 recruit since Chiney. I have no idea what recruiting was like in the early 90s, but starting in the early 2000s we had a series of top 5 recruits (I know Wiggins, Appel, Pedersen, Nneka and Chiney were all around top 5; I think Powell was right around 5 too?).
Given the lopsided nature of the women's game, one or two top-5 recruits can be the difference maker. It's notable that UConn's brief "down" period in the early 2010s was at the end of the Moore era and and before the start of the Stewwie/Mo/Tuck era when UConn had its weakest recruiting classes it's had in well over a decade - after Delle Donne transferred, UConn had no top ten recruits in the 2008 or 2009 classes, and, no surprise, UConn failed to take home the national title when those classes were upperclassmen in 2011 and 2012. Armed with three top 6 recruits, UConn then ran off 4 titles in a row.
We've had a few close to top ten (I think McCall was 11, and Beebe was around 11 also but never got to play), but this year we got our first top ten recruit since Chiney in Williams, and Dodson is so close (11) as to be the same. Still, they aren't yet contributing the way Megan Walker (no. 1) at Uconn and Evina Westbrook (no. 2) at Tennessee are.
2. We don't have our star player. McPhee is our leading scorer, go-to playmaker, and was on the regional final all-tournament team and the All-Pac-12 last spring. She's arguably more instrumental to our team than any single player since Cheney, given our lack of upperclass scoring. We've been the lower seed against UConn, Ohio State (x2) and Baylor, and without McPhee, there's even less reason to think we should win those games, all away from home. That doesn't fully explain some soft performances against midling competition, but I think we underestimate her absence.