After a rough and highly contested Iron Bowl of women’s basketball, Alabama dropped its third straight SEC loss to the Auburn Tigers, 78-65.
Before the game, the Tigers honored DeWannaBonner, a WNBA guard for the Connecticut Suns who played at Auburn, by retiring her number.
“This is my home…” Bonner said. “This is my family atmosphere. This is where I get my love, my joy. I haven’t been back in 14 years, and this weekend has been probably one of the best weekends of my life. I enjoy every single moment that I am at this university. Literally. I keep saying this, but I bleed orange and blue.”
The game started with a 10-point run for Auburn within the first three minutes of the match; Alabama only found 6 points in the first quarter.
Leading scorers like guards Sarah Ashlee Barker and Aaliyah Nye fell short this game, with neither making a single 3-pointer and only making a combined 15 points. Both players are known as two of the best 3-point shooters in the SEC, with Nye ranked 3rd and Barker ranked 20th.
Despite this, one Alabama player not only doubled her own average points per game but was this game point leader with 26 points. Guard Jessica Timmons only had 2 points in the first quarter but led her team to a 24-point quarter two — 14 of which were her own.
“I think we came out with less intensity,” Timmons said. “Our coach emphasized us playing better on defense, getting our team rhythm back, but we fell short. We just have to keep continuing to play hard and just find our mojo, and I think we’ll be a really good team, but we can’t let this one loss affect how we play down the road and stretch.”
Alabama was down 17 points only 4 minutes into the second quarter. Still, standout second and third quarters, which boasted 45 points, propelled Alabama to a smaller point deficit and a 3-minute lead over the Auburn Tigers.
The three minutes were short-lived, though, as two Alabama turnovers resulted in easy layups for the Tigers, which propelled the team back into the lead where it would stay for the rest of the game.
As the minutes wound down, the game only seemed to ramp up. Head coach Kristy Curry got into an altercation with one of the referees where she had to be pulled away by assistant head coach Roman Tubner and a Barker foul resulted in a technical foul for Alabama and a personal foul for Barker.
With 23 seconds left in the game, this awarded the Tigers three free throws, its final three points of the game.
“I know if I say anything about officiating, I will be held accountable,” Curry said. “Therefore, I’m going to follow SEC policy and not say anything about officiating, but you tell me what you saw at the end? Did anybody see the foul call? It wasn’t a foul. That’s why you can’t tell me what happened. We obviously had backed off. The ball game was over at that point.”
This aggressive attitude that took back a lead for Alabama may have also gotten the team into some trouble, with 21 personal fouls on Alabama players leading to guard Essence Cody and Barker fouling out and Timmons being just on the cusp of fouling out with four.
“They were very aggressive, very physical,” Auburn guard Honesty Scott-Grayson said. “I’m a little frail, so they just are throwing me around, but we knew that was going to happen.”
Despite going 41.1% from the field, this is thanks to the team’s second and third-quarter performances that averaged 58.7% from the field, but the first and fourth periods tell a different story, averaging only 27.9%
The team will head back to Tuscaloosa to prepare for the Kentucky Wildcats in the team’s Alumni game on Sunday at 4 p.m. CT. Fans can also watch on the SEC Network.
