I attended and then re-watched the game, but I haven't watched Geno's or the players' post game interviews yet.
However, I think many posters in this thread are making the classic mistake of confusing "shooting well" with "playing well". I think that if 50%, rather than 27%, of those shots in the first quarter had fallen (and most of them were good, wide-open shots), UConn would have had a 10-point lead at the end of the first quarter and most of the complainers in this thread would have had nothing to grouch about.
But I see that Geno also said that the first-half play was substandard. He doesn't usually confuse playing well with shooting well, or shooting poorly with playing poorly -- so I have to take his comment seriously. I guess he felt that the first-half defense wasn't disruptive enough, and perhaps he was right -- early in the third quarter, UConn got several steals that led to fast-break points, which never happened in the first half. Holy Cross was obviously trying to slow the pace of the game by using most of the shot clock before they took a shot, and UConn did not create enough pressure on the ball in the first half to prevent them from doing that. In the third quarter, that clearly changed, and perhaps Holy Cross got a bit fatigued.
By the way, can someone tell me (and the rest of the folks here) exactly what defensive mistake Ashlynn made in her first 10 seconds on the court that got her pulled immediately after she entered the game? I rewatched that play, and she did not appear to me to be out of position. She did get caught in a screen, which allowed her opponent to get open for a score, but the usual expectation is that a screen like that will cause a switch, so it would be someone else's responsibility to oppose the shot after Ashlynn was screened. Did Geno think that she should have gone under the screen rather than attempting to get over it? Or was there a communication issue? The play did occur right in front of the UConn bench, so maybe Geno didn't hear Ashlynn make a call that he expected her to make?