The LSU-Iowa arguments are sweet music for women's hoops

Tigers thrash Iowa to win Kim Mulkey's fourth NCAA title, as people cared enough to stir up controversy.

Kim Mulkey

Everybody had an opinion. Most people had a complaint.

The officials were awful. Angel Reese shouldn’t have mocked Caitlin Clark. Yeah, but Clark did it first. Yeah, but what about Joseph’s technicolor dreamcoat that Kim Mulkey wore on the sideline? How does that promote the players? And if you win with that many mistakes and that much NIL money, is LSU a basketball program or a corporate raider?

Those who care about women’s college basketball, and those who shivered in the shadow of the men’s Final Four all those years, and those who wondered when the game would escape the visegrip of Geno Auriemma and the Connecticut regime…….they’re all playing this LSU-Iowa noise through their Air Pods and they are dancing to it.

Nobody has ever cared enough about the women’s game to get so angry. The men’s game went a long way with its morality plays over the years, with Georgetown as the target and then the Fab Five and Duke and UNLV. All of that symbolism was exaggerated and largely unfair to the players involved, but it made you watch. That is what LSU and Iowa did in Dallas this past weekend. They knew that America was paying attention, and they weren’t going to let anyone get away peacefully, without a burr in the saddle area.

LSU beat Iowa, 102-85, for its first men’s or women’s basketball championship, and Mulkey’s fourth, to go with her three at Baylor in 2005, 2012 and 2019. Only Auriemma and Pat Sumitt have won more, and Mulkey is the only man or woman who is an NCAA champ as a player and assistant coach (Louisiana Tech) and then a head coach (Baylor, LSU).

LSU is 60-8 in her two coaching years there, and on Sunday the Tigers dealt with Cait The Great as well as anyone could. They also got some windfalls from new sources, but they managed to beat the team that had beaten the team that had won 42 consecutive games until Sunday. South Carolina, the 2022 champ, couldn’t have asked for a more galling successor.

Mulkey kept blinding the crowds and the TV cameras with her sideline outfits during the tournament. Apparently she ran out of flowers before she came up with Sunday’s indescribable garb, which made her look like an electrified Oscar statuette when she got mad at the zebras. In the realm of inviting the spotlight and shielding her players from it, Mulkey has no peer in men’s or women’s basketball. It’s possible that the Tigers drew strength from her example, as in, “If she’s got the gumption to wear something like that, what are we afraid of?”

Clark became the top scorer in the history of the women’s touranment on Sunday, and it figured that Mulkey would come up with something exotic for her. It also became obvious that the LSU players had heard quite enough, thank you, about the savvior of women’s basketball. Clark definitely belongs in the college pantheon, and the WNBA might well think about relocating a franchise to Des Moines to take full advantage.

But, just a couple of years ago, we saw and marveled at Sabrina Ionescu. Before that we saw and marveled at Candace Parker, Chamique Holdsclaw, Tamika Catchings, Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Sheryl Swoopes, Cheryl Miller, Lisa Leslie, Teresa Edwards and several dozen more. Maybe Clark is getting special notice because she was the proximate cause of Iowa’s run. The Tigers mighr suggest another reason.

In any event, LSU’s Angel Reese approached Clark just before the buzzer sounded, covered her face in an “I can’t see you” gesture, and pointed at her own ring finger. This detonated the Internet, at least for those who hadn’t seen Clark cover her own eyes, with the same needling intent, in previous games.

“This is for girls that look like me,” Reese said later. “It’s unapologetically you. Thanks to those who speak up for what they believe in.”

The officiating crew also caught hell, particularly when Iowa center Monika Czinano fouled out, and when Clark, reacting to a whistle, bounced a behind-the-back pass that left the court. She earned a silly technical foul for that, even though she did it casually and without much force. That “T” also became her fourth personal foul. Clark said later that the game was being called with extreme vigilance, and Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said the referees refused to listen or communicate.

Officiating is taking a public beating in all sports these days, precisely because the use, and overuse, of official reviews has exposed their occasional mistakes. It also has confirmed how good most of them are at their jobs, which, in college, are part-time jobs. Rest assured that the whistles did not determine who won this one.

First, LSU seemed to realize its best chance was to outscore Iowa, which isn’t deep and would have difficulty with Reese underneath. It did, but LSU could not have banked on 21 first-half points from Jasmine Carson, who had not scored a point since March 19 and was a 33.1 percent 3-point shooter overall, averaging 8.4 points. Here, Carson hit five of six threes and scored 21 in the first half alone.

Carson relayed the second-half torch to Alexis Morris, a more familiar game-tilter who poured in 19 points after intermission. Overall the Tigers hit 11 of 17 threes, which is pretty much checkmate on any level.

But it’s not that LSU ignored defense. Although Clark scored 30, she had plenty of traffic, and she did not score a two-point basket in the first 36 minutes. Her shooting range extends to the lobby, but she’s really influential when she can get inside a defense and destabilize it. She had six turnovers Sunday.

“We couldn’t give her the 10 or 12 points a game that she normally gets on layups,” Mulkey said.

“I probably could have attacked the rim more than I did,” Clark said. “I thought they played really good defense. They had more people waiting for me in the paint than South Carolina did.”

Overall Clark was 13 for 36 from long range at the Final Four and had 16 assists and 14 turnovers.

Mulkey turned the transfer portal into a stairway to heaven. Reese was already a star at Maryland. Morris had been at Baylor when Mulkey invited her off the team, and drifted to Texas A&M and Rutgers before she asked Mulkey for another chance. Carson is a grad transfer from West Virginia, and she was at Georgia Tech before that. There are beer trucks that haven’t visited as many campuses as LSU’s roster has.

More coaches are realizing that transfers are more mature than freshmen, are often more motivated, and have no real trouble with chemistry, having been around so many teammates. With collectives furnishing the money, as Miami’s did in helping Jim Larranaga build his Final Four team in the men’s game, this trend will accelerate unless the increasingly toothless NCAA comes up with some steering mechanisms.

The one unthinkable transfer is Clark, who is from West Des Moines. Her leaving would be like Hollywood producing Field of Dreams 2 in Las Vegas. She has one more year at Iowa before she can become eligible for the WNBA draft and could conceivably play one more after that. The sport will gladly accept however many games she can provide. The Iowa-South Carolina drew an average of 5.5 million viewers, the top audience for a women’s game since the UConn-Tennessee final in 2004 and the most viewers for any live ESPN event, except for football, since Game 7 of the Boston-Miami Eastern Conference Finals last June.

No ESPN college basketball game has done as well since a regular-season match between Duke and North Carolina in 2008.

At this writing, the numbers for Saturday’s men’s semifinals are still under wraps, but the fact that they consisted of Connecticut and three unusual suspects might not bode well. By the time the regionals came around in the final weekend of March, the tournament had already lost Kansas, Duke, Indiana, Kentucky and UCLA and it never had North Carolina or Villanova. Its ratings, for the Elite Eight round, were down six percent from 2022.

Many of the top men’s high school players are not considering college. They’re more inclined to check G League Ignite, which has already provided the NBA with Houston’s Jalen Green, Dallas’ Jaden Hardy and Golden State’s Jonathan Kuminga.

But you can bet there’s a high school girl, somewhere, who watched Clark Friday night and spent Saturday morning shooting hundreds of jumpers at her backyard rim. Caitlin Clark will be the bright shiny object for those players, at least until Kim Mulkey enters the building.