No doubt: Women’s game wins this season

The winner Sunday was women’s basketball.

South Carolina and Iowa played on a major network Sunday afternoon for the NCAA championship. A platform that would never been considered for women’s basketball — USC and Tennessee played Saturday morning at 11 a.m. local time 40 years ago just to get squeezed into the CBS window — should now be a permanent staple because the sport has become so popular and compelling.

South Carolina beat Iowa, 87-75, giving coach Dawn Staley her third national championship in eight years (seven if not counting 2020’s COVIDcancelled tournament). Perhaps men’s professional teams will entertain her candidacy because she has nothing left to prove.

As for Iowa, it marked the end of the amazing career of Caitlin Clark, the prolific scorer who took a middling Big Ten program to consecutive national championship games. She dazzled fans with her ability to swish jumpers from any spot on the floor, carrying a swag usually reserved for her male counterparts. Unfortunately, her style and maybe the fact she’s received so much adulation has created a share of critics, detractors, and haters, some of those former WNBA players.

The meteoric rise in the popularity of women’s basketball has been uncomfortable for some. There are those legends and stars who wonder what took the mainstream audience so long to appreciate what has always been a beautiful, fundamental game. There is more precision, better passing, and more dedication to the basic and essential elements of the game than their male counterparts.

These players have to be talented because the WNBA is one of the hardest leagues to make. There is no G League. There is no system to tutor players not quite good enough to make the league. It’s WNBA or overseas. So college players have to work feverishly on their games. They can’t take a chance of getting drafted on potential.

So the women’s college game is better than the men’s game. And the talent base is more intriguing because the players remain in school longer,

establish personalities — Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, Kamilla Cardoso, JuJu Watkins — and reputations. We can see the growth of their games and their brands.

Clark taking her team to a national championship would have been a storybook ending, but the Hawkeyes just weren’t good enough. Staley is able to recruit internationally because of the pristine program she has built.

Nearly a decade ago, my colleague, the great Dan Shaughnessy, asked on then-Twitter whether UConn beating Mississippi State by 60 points in the NCAA Tournament was “killing the women’s game” and he made an astute point. Geno Auriemma’s teams lambasting opponents on the way to the national championship was not enhancing the sport. The rest of women’s college basketball needed to upgrade. The talent needed to expand. There needed to be more suspense, more stars, more coaching personalities.

And that’s exactly what has happened in the past eight years. There were five or six teams with a legitimate shot at winning the national championship. There were well-known and even controversial stars because of NIL and the increased attention to the game. Major networks finally discovered that mainstream sports fans were interested in watching women’s basketball, especially when the sport was showcased in optimal viewing hours.

ESPN decided to dedicate four of its networks to airing every game of the NCAA Tournament. And then came Reese and Clark. Their emergence, unique personalities, braggadocio, and talent altered and intrigued the common basketball fan.

“I think the biggest thing is, for us, this team came along at a really good time, whether it was social media, whether it was NIL, whether it was our games being nationally televised,” Clark told reporters after the game. “We’ve played on Fox, NBC, CBS, ESPN — you go down the list, and we’ve been on every national television channel. I think that’s been one of the biggest things that has helped us. I think, no matter what sport it is, give them the same opportunities, believe in them the same, invest in them the same, and things are really going to thrive.

“You see it with other sports, and I’m a big fan of other sports. Like, I try to support as much as I can, and I think that’s the biggest thing is to continue to invest your time, money, and resources there, and continue to show up for those people and give them the opportunities. I think that’s what’s going to help drive women’s sports forward in the future.”

Watching women’s basketball became cool and vogue. Just ask the Celtics, who were all glued to the LSU-Iowa regional final last week in their locker room in Charlotte, N.C., after a victory over the Hornets. Just ask Celtics vice president of development Allison Feaster, who was watching the game on her phone walking to the team bus.

The hope is the interest in women’s basketball will continue to grow and even spread to the WNBA when Clark and Reese arrive there in coming weeks. Gone are the days where there was Connecticut, Tennessee, and then everybody else. Women’s college basketball has elevated its game and the viewing audience finally figured out that it’s an appealing sport with its share of story lines and personalities.

The sport has grown and the audience has evolved. And that partnership has turned women’s basketball into a compelling and marketable entity.

Sunday was a good day for women’s basketball and it was a good day for us sports diehards searching for more material to devour. Now comes the responsibility of keeping our commitment to the sport, because there are more stars, more personalities, more beefs, and more of this beautiful women’s game to come.