SACRAMENTO — Raven Johnson and Ta’Niya Latson won three state championships together in high school. So when Latson decided last spring that she would leave Florida State, where she played the first three years of her college basketball career and led the nation in scoring, Johnson made the obvious pitch: Come play at South Carolina with me, and maybe we can win an NCAA title together, too. There was no better display of that potential than what the pair did on Saturday.
No. 1 seed South Carolina easily downed No. 4 Oklahoma in the Sweet 16 by a score of 94–68. This one was functionally over by the second quarter: The Gamecocks never trailed and hit the locker room at the half up by 19. It’s a sort of dominance that has become standard in the NCAA tournament for South Carolina, now in its sixth consecutive Elite Eight, all six of which saw the program advance to the Final Four. But this particular win looked slightly different from the usual for the Gamecocks.
