{"id":563509,"date":"2026-04-04T05:13:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T05:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/563509\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T05:13:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T05:13:12","slug":"what-did-geno-auriemma-say-to-dawn-staley-final-four-fracas-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/563509\/","title":{"rendered":"What did Geno Auriemma say to Dawn Staley? Final Four fracas, explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

The biggest story to come out of Friday night’s Final Four women’s game<\/a> between South Carolina and UConn in Phoenix wasn’t from the court.<\/p>\n

The heated exchange<\/a> between UConn coach Geno Auriemma<\/a> and South Carolina coach Dawn Staley<\/a> dominated the broadcast and social media once the game had ended.<\/p>\n

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What exactly happened to make these two college basketball legends argue like they did? What did Auriemma say to Staley in the first place?<\/p>\n

As far as we can tell<\/a>, Auriemma seemingly brought up his frustration over Staley missing a pregame handshake. The two shook hands pregame<\/a>, but there was allegedly another formal one Auriemma says Staley missed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We’re not exactly sure why that would make Auriemma so mad in and of itself, but the pain of losing likely caused his anger to bubble over into something ugly and avoidable. He comes out of the situation looking poorly.<\/p>\n

That’s what we know, and, again, none of this reflects well on Auriemma in the slightest. Yikes.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on For The Win: What did Geno Auriemma say to Dawn Staley? Final Four fracas, explained<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The biggest story to come out of Friday night’s Final Four women’s game between South Carolina and UConn…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[2083,37762,5614,99,434],"class_list":{"0":"post-563509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-dawn-staley","9":"tag-geno-auriemma","10":"tag-south-carolina","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}