STARKVILLE, Miss. — Mississippi State women’s basketball will open the season with one of the SEC’s most feared shot blockers back in Starkville, after sophomore forward Madison Francis was voted to the coaches’ preseason All-SEC second team.
The league’s 16 head coaches picked the team this week. Francis is the only Bulldog on either preseason squad, sharing the second team with players from Florida, Kentucky, Ole Miss, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt’s Mikayla Blakes was chosen preseason player of the year.
The 6-foot-2 forward from Lancaster, New York, earned the spot on the strength of her first college season. She played in 31 games with 27 starts and put up 13.2 points, 7.4 rebounds and 2.8 blocks a night while leading the Bulldogs in scoring, steals, blocks and minutes.
Her 2.84 blocks per game were the best mark in the country, and she finished with 88 rejections. That defense put her on the SEC All-Defensive Team, making her the first freshman in the league to earn that honor since 2020 and the first at Mississippi State to do it since 2009. She also made the SEC All-Freshman Team and the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year watch list.
Mississippi State will lean on Francis again as it heads into another tough SEC schedule, with South Carolina alone placing four players across the two preseason teams. Beyond the defensive awards, Francis was twice picked as the SEC Freshman of the Week last season and was once named a national freshman of the week by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, giving Starkville fans plenty of reason to expect another big year.
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