After waiting through nearly 38 minutes of Baylor domination, the 2,361 folks who attended Sunday’s women’s basketball game at Cal got to see what they came for.

Well, sort of.

Brittney Griner dunked 52 times in high school -- Photo by HoopGurlz

They got to see the attempt at history, but they did not witness the making of history.

Baylor’s fabulous 6-foot-8 freshman Brittney Griner will dunk at some point soon, making her the seventh woman to dunk in an NCAA game.  Afterall, she dunked 52 times in 32 games last season when she was the top-rated high school senior in the country.  She also dunked in a preseason exhibition game but did not get any in the Baylor’s first two regular-season games.

She had 15 points and five blocks in No. 8 Baylor’s 69-49 victory over No. 17 Cal, and she showed a nice touch on her economical 10-foot turnaround jumper.  

But nobody really cared about that.    They wanted to see Griner become the first woman to dunk in a college game played west of the Mississippi River.     There have been 15 dunks in women’s NCAA games to date, with West Virginia’s Georgeann Wells getting the first one on Dec. 21, 1984 and Tennessee’s Candace Parker being the only one to dunk more than three times (Parker had seven career dunks).

Griner’s opportunity came with 2:10 left in the game, as she whirled along the baseline and reached up for a one-handed slam.   Griner was high enough but the ball bounced off the back rim.

“I should have gone up with two hands,” she said later.

That was the end of the excitement as Baylor’s young team looked far more mature than Cal’s young team.   Cal has the nation’s No. 4-rated freshman class, according to ESPN HoopGurlz, but Baylor’s freshman class is ranked No. 1, primarily because of the presence of Griney, who was always double teamed and often triple-teamed by the Cal zone defense.

None of that defensive pressure mattered because the Bears shot so poorly, hitting just 27.1 percent of their shots and turning the ball over 21 times.   That’s how a team winds up scoring only 49 points and probably how a team drops out of the top 25.

But they allowed no dunks.