The last time UConn women’s basketball didn’t play a non-conference game after New Year’s, the program had been to one Final Four, hadn’t won a national championship and had yet to produce a National Player of the Year.

That was the 1993-94 campaign. The following season, the Huskies faced Tennessee on Jan. 26, 1995 in the famous MLK Day game at Gampel Pavilion. In the 31 years that followed, UConn has played at least one non-conference game in the new year.

Until now.

This season, UConn has 12 non-league games on the schedule and all of them will take place before Dec. 20. After that, it’s all Big East play for the Huskies.

That decision proved to be outside UConn’s control.

“Unfortunately, it's getting harder to schedule those (marquee non-conference games) in January and February because all these teams play in leagues that have 20 teams. So I'm hopeful that, in the future, we can squeeze one in here or there,” Geno Auriemma said on Sunday.

As a result, the Huskies will have to find a way to navigate the final two months of the regular season and prepare themselves for the NCAA Tournament without a meaningful test. They haven’t lost a Big East game in their last 70 tries dating back to Feb. 21, 2023. Since it joined the conference in 2020, UConn has more trips to the Final Four (five) than losses in league play (three).

But the Huskies will certainly be battle-tested by the time they return home for the holidays. Including exhibitions, they’ll play 12 teams that made the NCAA Tournament in 2026, 10 that finished in the AP Top 25 and five of the other seven teams from the Elite Eight. They have dates with presumptive preseason No. 1 South Carolina, Kim Mulkey and LSU, and an upstart Michigan team that nearly knocked off the Huskies last season — to name just a few.

“What if we're 10-5 at Christmas time? I'm gonna be afraid to leave the state. They won't let me back in,” Auriemma joked. “It's just a lot of great, great, great games… This year, it's front-loaded. It's gonna be hard. It's gonna be really hard. I wish we could spread them out more, but it'll be good for us. It'll be good for us. I think it'll be really, really, really good for us.”

UConn routinely builds the toughest non-conference schedule in the country, so this is nothing new — even if this year’s is especially difficult. The Huskies probably won’t come out of it undefeated like they did last season, but Auriemma can live with that.

“I don't think you can worry about your record — not that we do, ever. But I think if you're going to play schedules like that, like we do, you can't worry about your record. You can't worry about your seeding. You can't worry about that stuff,” Auriemma said. “You play these games because that's what the players want to do. That's what your fans expect you to do. That's what the TV people pay you to do. So we're playing them.”

UConn knows it can overcome a slow start, too. When injuries piled up early in the 2023-24 season, the Huskies sat at 4-3 in early December — the most losses they’d picked up by that point in the calendar since 1986-87, Auriemma’s second year in charge. Despite that, UConn still made it to the Final Four as a 3-seed.

The Huskies will survive whatever the schedule throws at them.

The lack of non-conference games in the new year isn’t the only quirk on UConn’s slate, either. The Huskies will play three exhibition games in October, beginning on Oct. 12 against Syracuse at Mohegan Sun Arena.

“We used to not be able to start practice until October 15th. Now we have a scrimmage in front of people on October 12th,” Auriemma said.

The proliferation of exhibition games is a new trend in college basketball. For years, UConn would play two exhibitions against Division II competition ahead of the regular season. More recently, the Huskies moved to one exhibition and one closed-door scrimmage against a regional opponent — Boston College, Syracuse and Columbia, for example.

Now, UConn has three exhibitions, all of which are against Division I teams — including a heavyweight matchup with Texas on Oct. 19.

“It's almost like NFL training camp,” Auriemma said. “You have preseason games, but you're really trying to see some things in a live game. Obviously you want to win and play great, but the fact that we can do these three [games] now does give you a little bit of a better idea of what you're working with.”

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