DALLAS — As the crowd roared with displeasure, Caitlin Clark’s jaw dropped. Mouth agape, she looked stunned as she walked toward the Iowa bench. She held her palms up as if to ask: What did I do?
For some, the lasting image of the 2023 women’s basketball national championship game will be Kim Mulkey’s tears of joy or Angel Reese taunting Clark in the final seconds. For me, it’s the absurdity of the technical foul levied against Clark for casually flipping a basketball behind her back. The foul, Clark’s fourth, put the most exciting player in the sport on the bench with 63 seconds left in the third quarter. LSU thoroughly outplayed Iowa on Sunday, but that’s not what everyone was buzzing about afterward.
Women’s basketball deserves better. It deserves better officiating. It deserves smarter commentary from the peanut gallery. Most of all, it deserves to be treated as the serious sport it is.
There were 37 fouls called in 40 minutes of play on Sunday, split evenly between the teams. Both LSU and Iowa endured ticky-tack calls that forced their best players to ride the bench in the biggest game of their lives. Reese missed the entire second quarter due to a couple of early foul calls. Clark picked up two early, too — called for push-offs, not even on the defensive end of the floor. “I thought they called it very, very tight,” she said afterward. “Obviously, foul trouble is not really what you want in a national championship game.”
Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder went even further, saying that she was most frustrated because the officials weren’t even listening to her on the court. Three of her five starters began the fourth quarter on the bench. Her counterpart at LSU, Kim Mulkey, seemingly had much more success working the refs; she was never T’d up despite walking onto the court many times and even making physical contact with an official.
It was, in a word, embarrassing.
The players did not deserve such a poorly and inconsistently officiated game. The coaches didn’t, either. And the sellout crowd and record-setting number of fans tuning in to watch Clark and Reese (9.9 million, ESPN said in a release Monday) did not pay for those tickets or turn on their television sets to see stoppage after stoppage and hear the screeching of the whistle.
“From a fan standpoint, there was enormous disappointment with how the game was officiated because the best players were not playing,” said John Adams, former NCAA national coordinator of men’s basketball officiating. “Having that level of officiating in that type of game, I think, really hurt the meteoric rise of women’s basketball. There is not perfect officiating anywhere ever, but, man, that was awful.”
Adams, who headed up the men’s officiating program from 2008 to 2015, said he used to remind his Final Four officiating crews that the games were always better when the best players were playing. It was the only time over the course of the entire tournament that he met with them personally — the reminder was that important.
Women’s basketball has endured sorry officiating for some time, but it has not always been given this kind of spotlight in front of audiences this big. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say, and it’s time to fix this now. That means a more robust recruiting program, better training and a stricter evaluation process to determine which officials advance to the biggest games. This can never happen again, not as the sport continues to grow.
For so long, fans and media members alike have treated women’s basketball — and women’s sports in general — as some sort of charity case. It wasn’t about the product on the court as much as it was about patting yourself on the back for being one of the good guys. It didn’t matter if those tickets you got for the game came as part of some discounted package to try to fill seats, or if they were free. Brownie points counted just the same.
More than 6 million people tuned in to watch Iowa play South Carolina in the Final Four on Friday night. Iowa-LSU was broadcast on ABC, easily accessible to even more eyeballs. The cheapest single ticket to get into American Airlines Center on Sunday was more than $400. Clark and Reese are bona fide stars, attracting massive followings on social media and big-money NIL deals. The demand to see them square off was real; no one watched this game simply to support the sport but rather because they wanted to watch a great game with compelling figures.
We witnessed a sport take a giant leap this weekend. It’s not often you realize something like that is happening in the moment, but it was undeniable. That’s why the officiating bothered me so much. It’s also why I couldn’t stand the discourse that popped up after the game around Reese and Clark, who are both elite trash-talkers. Of course, there was the racial undertone of comments praising Clark for her behavior on the court but calling Reese “classless” (a word that was trending on Twitter in the aftermath) for her taunting. Cultures clashed in a big way on multiple fronts.
So many of the male pundits who rushed into the conversation ostensibly on Clark’s behalf wanted to paint her as a victim, despite the fact that Clark expressed no anger or hurt feelings afterward and said she didn’t even see Reese’s hand-waving because she was trying to get to the handshake line. Clark is a trash-talker and a relentless competitor, just like Reese, and they’ll both continue to play that way because it’s what makes them great. But the pundits who teed off on Reese to somehow protect Clark were doing so with arrogance and such obvious paternalism, in addition to the thinly veiled racism.
Caitlin Clark does not need a white knight. She is not your charity case, either. She is an athlete who handles her business and should be treated as any elite male athlete would be. This is a sport that should be treated as a real sport, which means there are winners and losers and also debates about which player is best. It’s OK to criticize players and coaches who make mistakes. For so long, the gatekeepers of the sport believed they needed to be advocates for women’s basketball at all times for it to grow, and that meant only writing positive stories or treating players with kid gloves. We should be well past that now.
So, let’s level up the sport to meet its moment. Fix the officiating that has been subpar and unacceptable for way too long. Treat the product as the money-maker it is when its media rights deal comes up. And allow these tough-as-hell women to fight their own battles.
That is what this sport deserves.
(Photo of Caitlin Clark: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
