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…
