There was a festive air for the Stanford women’s first twirl in this year’s Big Dance. For one thing, a couple of Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks were in attendance at Maples Pavilion.

As far as the game, this one was over early.

The No. 2-seeded Cardinal scored the first 15 points, and they held No. 15 UC Davis to 29 percent shooting for the first-round NCAA Tournament game, a 79-54 blowout on Saturday.

“We were off for two weeks, so I wasn’t exactly sure what we’d see,” head coach Tara VanDerveer said. “But our first quarter really set the tone.”

It was 29-9 after the quarter, and the Cardinal (29-4) extended their all-time tournament home record to 37-4. They were much too big, too quick and too talented for the Aggies (25-7).

Morgan Bertsch, the nation’s fourth-leading scorer and UC Davis’ all-time points leader, had 25 points, but she was just 8-for-25 from the floor.

The senior said she knew she was going to see a lot of different defenses in what turned out to be her final college game.

“The thing I had the biggest trouble with was them changing it up so much,” she said. “It was hard to get in a rhythm, trying to figure out whether the double(-team) was there, or someone on the backside. It was hard to make that read.”

Stanford will play seventh-seeded BYU at 8 p.m. Monday. The Cougars built a 15-point lead, then held off 10th-seeded Auburn 73-64.

Alanna Smith scored 21 points in just 21 minutes and Kiana Williams added 19 points and five assists to lead Stanford. DiJonai Carrington had 12 points and seven rebounds.

The 6-foot-3 Bertsch, a Santa Rosa native, left to an ovation in the final minute.

“Obviously, she’s a very talented player,” Smith said. “We just wanted to keep her in front. She uses a lot of fakes. We didn’t want her to get anything easy. … We threw what we had at her and did a pretty good job of it.”

It took UC Davis nearly six minutes to score its first points. At the half, Stanford led 49-26.

Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback, was on hand to root for his sister, Anna, a reserve guard for Stanford. Former 49ers quarterback Steve Young was cheering for his alma mater, BYU, in the early game.

Over the years, the UC Davis coaching staff has been very helpful to the Stanford staff in teaching the intricacies of the Princeton offense, a style that the Cardinal have relied on, while the Aggies don’t use it much anymore.

Aggies head coach Jennifer Gross said she told her husband, Joe Teramoto, her associate head coach, this week: “Maybe we shouldn’t have told them everything.”

Tom FitzGerald is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tfitzgerald@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @tomgfitzgerald