Dawn Staley Wore Balenciaga and Her Team Wore the Loss Yet Again
Dawn Staley Wore Balenciaga and Her Team Wore the Loss Yet Again
Dawn Staley walked into the national championship game on Sunday wearing a $2,300 Balenciaga jacket. Black, with the brand’s name across the front in white lettering. No South Carolina logo. No Gamecocks branding. No team colors.
She walked out having lost 79-51 to UCLA, the third-largest margin of victory in the history of the women’s title game.
One of those things is getting more attention than the other. And it shouldn’t be the jacket. But the jacket tells you something.
The brand
Dawn Staley is, by any reasonable measure, one of the greatest coaches in the history of women’s college basketball. Three national championships. A perfect 38-0 season in 2024. Five National Coach of the Year awards. The highest-paid women’s basketball coach in the country at $4.25 million a year. A $25.25 million contract running through 2030.
She is also, increasingly, a brand. Her fans call her “Louis Vuitton Dawn.” She wore Gucci for the first round this year. Balenciaga for the second. Gucci again for the Sweet 16. A bedazzled blazer with a South Carolina logo for the Elite Eight. Louis Vuitton for the Final Four.
Her memoir, “Uncommon Favor,” came out in May 2025 and became a New York Times bestseller. She has an Essence feature. WWD tracks her outfits. There are entire articles dedicated to ranking her sideline looks by game.
None of this is inherently a problem. She’s earned the right to wear whatever she wants. She’s won enough to fill an entire trophy case, and if she wants to do it in a $2,300 jacket with somebody else’s name on it, that’s her call.
But tonight, in a national championship game, that call looked different.
The game
South Carolina shot 29% from the field. They went 2-for-15 from three. Their starters combined to shoot 8-for-31. Their leading scorer, Joyce Edwards, was held to 3-for-10 for eight points.
UCLA outrebounded them 49-37. The Bruins had a 23-13 assist-to-turnover ratio while South Carolina managed nine assists against 14 turnovers.
The third quarter was the worst of it. UCLA outscored South Carolina 25-9, the largest single-quarter scoring margin in championship game history. By the end of that quarter, it was 61-32. The game was functionally over with ten minutes still to play.
South Carolina averaged 86.5 points per game this season. They scored 51. That’s 35 points below their own standard.
Gabriela Jaquez finished with 21 points, 10 rebounds, and five assists. She became only the fifth player in history to post a 20-10-5 line in a national title game. Lauren Betts had 14 and 11. UCLA’s six seniors scored every single one of the team’s 79 points.
Cori Close, UCLA’s head coach, won her first national championship in her 15th season. She wasn’t trending on social media for her outfit.
The contrast
Here’s what’s hard to ignore. In the biggest game of the season, Dawn Staley stood on the sideline wearing a luxury fashion brand instead of anything connected to her university, her players, or her program. And her team played like they weren’t connected to any of those things either.
Is the jacket why South Carolina lost? Of course not. UCLA was better. Their defense was suffocating. Their size inside was a problem South Carolina never solved. Betts and Jaquez dominated from the opening tip.
But the jacket is a symbol of something that has been building for a while. Dawn Staley the brand has gotten very big. And in a game where South Carolina looked unprepared, unfocused, and overmatched, the fact that their head coach showed up wearing another company’s name was hard to look past.
Two days earlier, she beat UConn 62-48 in the Final Four. She looked every bit the championship coach. Geno Auriemma lost his composure so badly that he walked across the court to confront Staley before the final buzzer, and assistants from both teams had to separate them. Auriemma apologized publicly the next day. Staley handled all of it with class and focus.
Two days later, against UCLA, that focus was nowhere to be found. South Carolina came out flat, fell behind early, never adjusted, and got run off the floor by a team that wanted it more.
What this isn’t
This is not a hit piece on Dawn Staley’s career. Her resume speaks for itself. Three titles. A perfect season. She’s built South Carolina into the standard of women’s college basketball. She’s the first Black head coach in Division I basketball, men’s or women’s, to lead a team to an undefeated championship. That matters, and nobody should minimize it.
This is also not about whether a coach should wear designer clothes. Coaches can wear whatever they want. If Staley wants to be a fashion icon, she’s earned the platform.
But there’s a question that tonight’s game raised, and it’s not one that goes away just because of everything she’s accomplished before. When you show up to a national championship game wearing Balenciaga instead of your school’s name, and your team puts up 51 points on 29% shooting in the worst title-game performance your program has ever had, people are going to connect those dots.
Whether the connection is fair or not is a separate conversation. But the image will stick: Staley, in Balenciaga, watching her team get outscored 25-9 in the third quarter of a championship game.
She’s still one of the best coaches in the sport. But tonight, the brand showed up and the coaching didn’t.
A graduate from the University of Texas, Anthony Amador has been credentialed to cover the Houston Texans, Dallas Cowboys, San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks and high school games all over the Lone Star State. Currently, his primary beats are the NBA, MLB, NFL and UFC.
