The first women's college basketball power rankings of the season are out, and South Carolina opens at No. 1, with its upcoming meeting against JuJu Watkins and No. 3 USC already marked as the game that will tell us whether that ranking is earned or just inherited.
That's not a small thing to hand Dawn Staley's program. South Carolina has spent the better part of a decade being the standard other teams measure themselves against, and the Gamecocks keep reloading instead of rebuilding, losing stars to the draft and finding the next ones waiting. The résumé speaks for itself: a title run that ended with a win over Iowa in 2024, played in front of the biggest audience women's college basketball has ever drawn. Starting at No. 1 is as much about trust in the program as it is about the current roster.
USC's presence at No. 3 is its own story. JuJu Watkins has turned a program that spent years on the outside of the national conversation into one that can host a top-five showdown and have it feel like the biggest game on the board, no pun necessary, since there's no board here. She's the reason USC gets built into the rankings conversation instead of just mentioned in it.
Zoom out and the bigger headline might be the volume. ESPN is rolling nearly 280 women's college basketball matchups across its networks in a single week this month, the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that simply didn't exist a few seasons ago. The rankings are a symptom of that growth, not the cause of it. More games on more networks means more teams get a real spotlight, and more rivalries like South Carolina and USC get built in real time instead of after the fact.
What I'm watching next is simple: whether South Carolina's record holds up once it actually plays its highest-ranked opponent. Preseason No. 1 means nothing by itself. The meeting with USC is where it gets tested.