BYU women's basketball team shows they don't have to play on Sundays to win

Huddled in a news conference on a Sunday afternoon in a basketball arena in Ames, Iowa, a handful of reporters from around the country were stunned -- eyebrows raised and mouths agape.

They couldn't believe what they were hearing on that March day in 2002.

Dressed in Sunday-best attire, a couple of members of the No. 11-seeded BYU women's basketball team, which had crushed No. 6 seed Florida the previous day, 90-52, in the tournament's first round (it marked the program's first-ever NCAA tournament victory), sat in front of the media. They fielded questions about the Cougars' second-round, Monday-night matchup against vaunted No. 3 seed Iowa State -- on the Cyclones' home floor.

What reporters could not comprehend was that on the day before BYU's biggest game of the season -- and the biggest game in the program's 30-year history -- the Cougar women's basketball team rested.