Paige Bueckers, welcome back to March (2024)

UConn advanced to the Final Four for the 23rd time in program history with an 80-73 win over USC on Monday in Portland, Ore.

The third-seeded Huskies (33-5) complete a Final Four that includes No. 1 South Carolina (36-0), No. 1 Iowa (33-4) and No. 3 NC State (31-6). South Carolina and NC State will play at 7 p.m. ET on Friday, with Iowa-UConn following. The games will be played at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.

UConn, which saw its streak of 14 consecutive Final Fours end with a Sweet 16 loss last season, advanced behind Paige Bueckers’ 28 points, 10 rebounds and six assists. The Huskies will try for their first national championship since 2016.

The Huskies’ matchup with the Hawkeyes will pit two of the game’s stars in Bueckers and Caitlin Clark. Clark put on a show in a 94-87 win over LSU on Monday, scoring 41 points, tying an NCAA Tournament record with nine 3-pointers, dishing out 12 assists and grabbing seven rebounds in the national championship rematch. The Hawkeyes are seeking their first national championship.

Undefeated South Carolina is the heavy favorite as it looks to become the first team to complete an unbeaten season since UConn in 2016. South Carolina defeated Oregon State in the Elite Eight on Sunday to reach its fourth consecutive Final Four. A title would be coach Dawn Staley’s third (2017, 2022).

NC State is in the Final Four for the first time since 1998 after its 76-66 win over No. 1 Texas on Sunday. The Wolfpack also defeated second-seeded Stanford en route to Cleveland.

PORTLAND, Ore. — There were times last year when they were both undergoing treatment to rehabilitate their injured knees when UConn forward Ice Brady can remember Paige Bueckers barely being able to walk.

Bueckers tore her ACL in August 2022 during a summer pickup game that sidelined her for the entirety of the 2022-23 season. This, after missing 19 games the season before with a tibial plateau fracture from a non-contact injury. She couldn’t help the Huskies when their streak of 14 consecutive Final Four appearances came to an end last season. Couldn’t give her head coach any on-court contributions in what became one of the most trying seasons of Geno Auriemma’s career.

So when Brady watched Bueckers drop 32 points, grab 10 rebounds and finish with 6 assists and 4 steals against Syracuse last week in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, she made sure to take it all in.

“After the last game, just watching everything back, I’m just amazed,” she said.

She wasn’t the only one.

“We have the best player in America,” Auriemma famously said last week. “And you know, (I’m) just saying that because the numbers in this world of analytics — the numbers say that she is.”

Welcome back to March, Paige Buckets.

“Everybody knows I haven’t had the smoothest sailing in college,” Bueckers said Friday. “I’ve had injuries, a lot of adversity. But (I’m) just taking whatever life throws at me, continuing to conquer it with a great mentality.”

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Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer called a measurement error that led to the top of the 3-point line being marked 9 inches shorter at one end of the court for the first five games of the women’s NCAA Tournament’s Portland regional “inexcusable and unfair to every team that played on it.”

“When you arrive at a gym, especially in the NCAA Tournament, at the very least you expect the baskets to be 10 feet and the floor markings to be correct,” VanDerveer said in a statement Monday. “For an error of that magnitude to overshadow what has been an incredible two weekends of basketball featuring sensational teams and incredible individual performances is unacceptable and extremely upsetting.”

The NCAA said Monday it corrected the issue ahead of the Elite Eight game between No. 1 USC and No. 3 Connecticut. That game is set for 9:15 p.m. ET on Monday.

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It’s Paige Bueckers versus JuJu Watkins, but the USC freshman is bringing a few more friends to the party. While UConn labored to get past Duke with its six-player rotation, USC closed out Baylor by bringing in fresh role players in Kayla Williams and Clarice Akunwafo, a depth advantage that will be an asset to the Trojans on one day of rest.

The Huskies have experience on this stage, with three of their starters (Bueckers, Aaliyah Edwards and Nika Mühl) featured on UConn’s 2021 and 2022 Final Four teams. But newness hasn’t been a challenge for USC, which has figured out how to adapt on the fly with a rotation featuring seven upperclassmen and Watkins, as well as a coach who has been here before. The Trojans have executed in close games all season long and have beaten a number of top teams, including Oregon State, UCLA and Stanford twice. On the other side, UConn didn’t beat any team that advanced to the Sweet 16 during the regular season despite having five chances. The Huskies didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory in their win over the Blue Devils, who were the lowest-seeded team remaining in the field.

Bueckers might be the best player on the court — mostly because her efficiency trumps that of Watkins — but USC has a track record of success against high-level competition. And even if Watkins isn’t quite at Bueckers’ level yet, the margin is essentially negligible. USC’s size, depth and unbridled confidence should be enough to carry them to the Final Four.

The pick: USC

Picture this: It’s the night of Selection Sunday. Both the men’s and women’s tournament brackets are set. You log onto a sportsbook and see that you can wager on every scheduled men’s game. Depending on what state you’re in, you can bet on futures, specific rounds of the tournament, game lines, spread, player props and team props.

But the odds for the women’s games? Nowhere to be found.

The next day, Monday morning, still crickets.

A year ago, I wrote an article exploring the question of whether sportsbooks were keeping up with the growing popularity of women’s college basketball. The answer then was a resounding no. In all honesty, I set out to write this article expecting that I would find a similarly negative trend. And on the Monday morning after this year’s Selection Sunday, it looked like sportsbooks were behind the ball yet again.

But, slowly, a few markets started to roll in. DraftKings added the women’s tournament to its “popular” tab and had a point spread for every scheduled game, though not always a moneyline or total. FanDuel put up some game lines and player props for big names like Angel Reese (LSU), JuJu Watkins (USC), Hannah Hidalgo (Notre Dame), Paige Bueckers (UConn) — and a separate tab just for “Caitlin Clark Specials.”

The “Caitlin Clark effect” has hit sportsbooks.

(Note: The so-called “Caitlin Clark effect” — increased attention, viewership, ticket sales and profits in the women’s game — is bigger than just one player. Although Clark is likely the biggest factor this year, we might also call it the Angel Reese Rise, the South Carolina Surge … I could go on, but I will spare you.)

Ultimately, what I found in my research this year was a more positive trend than I expected in the number and variety of markets on women’s college hoops year over year — but still a massive opportunity gap between the men’s and women’s tournaments.

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STORRS, Conn. — From a fluorescent-lit hospital room, Geno Auriemma tracked his team from his phone.

The Hall of Fame coach – with 11 national titles, eight coach of the year awards and more games won than almost anyone who has ever set foot on a sideline – was waiting for a box score to update minute by minute.

Shorthanded as ever in that 2022-23 season, UConn defeated Florida State that Sunday afternoon. This was the machine he built over his four-decade career. Even without him, his players were OK.

But he was not.

Just a week and a half earlier, his mother, Marsiella, the “one constant” in his life, died at age 91. Her funeral was five days later.

And now, as the white coat sat down across from him, Auriemma knew he had been right to leave the team’s shootaround that morning. He has coached long enough to know the look on someone’s face when they have upsetting news, and he has lived long enough to understand that a hospital doesn’t bring a specialist into the room to tell you that everything is fine.

Auriemma needed surgery to unblock one of his carotid arteries. The procedure wasn’t urgent, but it was necessary.

The next day, as his team went into prep mode for Seton Hall, Auriemma had the surgery.

Outside of his family, he told five people the truth — his assistant coaches and his athletic director. Everyone else was told he had flu-like symptoms. “I didn’t want to scare them,” he says.

The hospital suggested a four-week recovery. Athletic director David Benedict said he should take as much time as he needed.

Seven days later, he was back at practice.

“You can’t get to where we’ve been without being the person who’s constantly chasing, constantly reaching, constantly wants more,” Auriemma says. “Whatever you have — it’s not good enough.”

Auriemma built the UConn dynasty by obsessively looking for what could go wrong. Admittedly, that was easy for him. He could always spot potential problems. The perfectionist in him thrived in this setting. But this time, too much was broken.

He was now the oldest living person in his family, and that reality hit him hard. His body reminded him that he was pushing 70. Meanwhile, he had five high school All-Americans sitting on his bench with a slew of injuries. The perfection he spent his life and career building was falling apart by the day, it felt.

And he couldn’t do anything about it.

“It engulfed me,” Auriemma says. “And I couldn’t see my way out.”

For the first time in his career, he was forced to truly reckon with the beast. Not the program that he had built, one that had come to define the sport. And not just a UConn that was once so dominant people said it would ruin women’s basketball. But the piece inside of him that had driven him to do it all along.

The question he had never been able to answer.

When was good enough going to be good enough?

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PORTLAND, Ore. — Thirty minutes have passed since USC defeated Baylor 74-70 in a barnburner that featured 11 lead changes and a Trojans rally in the fourth quarter. JuJu Watkins just put up 30 points on national television, the latest in a series of exploits in an All-America season, leading her school to its first Elite Eight in 30 years.

And here is the freshman, sitting on her phone, watching TikToks.

No big celebrations, no scrolling through her messages, and no outward evidence that Watkins has just done something unheard of for most 18-year-olds. This isn’t indifference — Watkins is having a great time in the NCAA Tournament, thoroughly excited by the prospect of continuing to play with this USC team, but leading her team on both ends of the floor is her role. This is a normal day for Watkins, and that means TikToks.

“She’s used to this, she’s used to the moment,” graduate transfer Kayla Williams says. “This is nothing new. This doesn’t faze her.”

This is trailing in the fourth quarter and facing down the prospect of a magical season coming to an end. But for Watkins, all that means is takeover time.

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If you are a sports media viewership nerd — (raises hand) — you start to think about what is possible. Seven million viewers? Eight million? Nine million? How high can Monday night go? We are in the middle of the greatest women’s college basketball tournament in history, and Iowa vs. LSU in the Elite Eight is the most anticipated non-Final Four game ever held. The game is a rematch of last year’s national championship, which averaged 9.9 million viewers and peaked at 12.6 million, the most-viewed women’s college basketball game on record.

Last year’s title game was a unicorn. It changed public perception, investment in the sport, everything. The previous record for an NCAA women’s basketball title game in the ESPN era (since 1996) was 5.68 million viewers for UConn’s title win over Oklahoma in 2002. (The previous all-time record, per Sports Media Watch, is believed to be 8.1 million viewers for a Virginia-Stanford national semifinal on CBS in 1992.) LSU’s win over Iowa obliterated it.

Now comes an Elite Eight doubleheader that highlights everything about the evolution of the sport. ESPN will air No. 1 seed Iowa against No. 3 LSU at 7:15 p.m. ET, followed by No. 1 USC vs. No. 3 UConn. The headliners playing in Albany and Portland over those four-plus hours — Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, LSU’s Angel Reese, USC’s JuJu Watkins and UConn’s Paige Bueckers — are massive stars in college basketball, regardless of gender. Ryan Ruocco, Rebecca Lobo and Holly Rowe — the broadcast team that calls the Final Four — will call Iowa-LSU. Beth Mowins, Debbie Antonelli and Angel Gray will call USC-UConn.

“We’re excited for the opportunity to document this,” said ESPN vice president of production Sara Gaiero, the company’s point person for strategic oversight and management of ESPN’s NCAA women’s basketball coverage. “The matchup we have on Monday is something on Selection Sunday everyone was talking about and had circled in anticipation that this could happen. It’s a great opportunity for women’s basketball. There’s so much interest in this game because of everything we saw in the national championship last year, because of this LSU team, and the Caitlin Clark effect.”

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Over the last month, The Athletic connected with more than 35 head coaches across women’s basketball to get their candid opinions on an array of topics from the changing tides in the sport to the best coaches in the game to the greatest women’s college basketball player of all time. These coaches, who hail from power conferences and high mid-majors, were granted anonymity so they could speak openly without fear of retribution from their own programs or the NCAA.

Head coaches’ jobs are all-encompassing in college basketball. They have to recruit, and in the age of the portal, re-recruit. They have to scour opposing rosters to find players who would be suitable transfers. They work with athletic departments for appropriate facilities and accommodations. There’s an entire ecosystem under their purview.

Of course, the most important part of their role is putting together the product that shows up on the court. That job is multi-faceted in and of itself. Beyond spearheading player development, coaches design the offensive schemes, the defensive game plans and make adjustments when necessary. This is the part that’s easiest for their peers to evaluate because the results speak for themselves in games. It’s hard to know what goes on behind the scenes at any program; within those 94 feet, everything is visible.

Which coach would you pick to design an offensive game plan for you?

• Geno Auriemma, UConn: 4 votes
• Jennie Baranczyk, Oklahoma: 4 votes
• Lisa Bluder, Iowa: 3 votes
• Karl Smesko, Florida Gulf Coast: 3 votes
• Tara VanDerveer, Stanford: 3 votes

Auriemma historically has fielded some of the most talented rosters in the country, giving him a leg up when it comes to executing on the court. Over the past few seasons, even as the best players dispersed across more programs and numerous Huskies players sustained injuries, Auriemma still has put together elite offenses. UConn has done so in a variety of different ways, too.

Consider that three years ago, Paige Bueckers won national player of the year as a point guard, largely playing next to two bigs and two non-shooting wings, as UConn posted the third-best offensive rating in the country, per Her Hoop Stats. Now, as a senior, Bueckers is essentially a power forward. She plays next to two other ballhandlers, one big and one spacer, but she’s even more efficient and will be an All-American yet again as the focal point of the nation’s eighth-best offense. In 2023-24, Auriemma has had to reinvent how he uses his best player, not to mention the evolving roles of Aaliyah Edwards and Nika Mühl, but the Huskies haven’t skipped a beat.

In their words

“He has figured out how to do it from a spacing and screening standpoint that’s not complicated, but effective. He makes basketball into simple reads.”

“They execute and they score and they’re efficient. They do that at an elite level regardless of their personnel.”

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USC freshman guard JuJu Watkins made the first shot of her college career — a running right-handed floater after breaking Ohio State’s vaunted press — to score the first basket of the Trojans season. In USC’s opening win over the Buckeyes, she would hit 10 more field goals and finish with a game-high 32 points.

“This is who she is,” coach Lindsay Gottlieb said afterward. “She’s ridiculous, and you get used to it.”

Well, the country has gotten used to it, even if opponents haven’t learned how to slow her down. What she’s doing shouldn’t be taken as commonplace. Throughout the season, Watkins reinforced what her coach said that night in Las Vegas, averaging 27.8 points per game — second-most in the nation behind only Iowa’s Caitlin Clark — while adding 7.2 rebounds and 3.4 assists per contest. With a smooth and varied offensive repertoire, the 6-foot-2 guard led the Trojans to their highest win total since 1994. “Her body, her skills, her mental toughness,” Indiana Fever general manager Lin Dunn said of Watkins back in December. “I think she may be ready for the pros right now.”

Watkins might be The Athletic’s Freshman of the Year Award, but she is just part of a freshman class that has the potential to be among the sport’s best-ever groups. Notre Dame guard Hannah Hidalgo finished the regular season third in the nation in scoring (23.8 points per game), while adding 6.5 rebounds, 5.4 assists and a NCAA-best 4.9 steals per game. Coaches already say she is one of the — if not the most — impactful defenders in the sport. (She led the nation in defensive win-shares, per HerHoopStats.) It would be hard to vehemently disagree with any arguments putting her over Watkins in any Freshman of the Year discussions; both are members of our All-America team.

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PORTLAND, Ore. — The top of the 3-point line was marked 9 inches shorter at one end of the court for the first five games of the women’s NCAA Tournament’s Portland regional, the NCAA said, adding that it has corrected the issue ahead of Monday’s Elite Eight game between No. 1 USC and No. 3 Connecticut.

The NCAA got word on Sunday, just before No. 1 Texas and No. 3 NC State were set to tip off, that the two lines were uneven. The line by the Texas bench was correct, but the line by the NC State bench was too short. Both teams elected to play the game without the court’s correction.

The NCAA did not confirm how it first discovered the issue, but called it a “human error” by a finisher contracted by Connor Sports, the official vendor of the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournament courts since 2006. The NCAA apologized for the issue, writing in a statement that it wishes it caught the error sooner.

The incorrect 3-point line has been painted “with a color that matches as closely as possible the wood grain of the floor,” the NCAA said Monday. The correct 3-point line — 22 feet, 1 3/4 inches from the basket — will be marked in black.

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ALBANY, N.Y. — It truly feels like Christmas morning.

There’s no other accurate way to describe the level of anticipation here ahead of Iowa-LSU’s Elite Eight matchup, a rematch of last year’s record-setting national championship game featuring the sport’s two biggest stars in Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. But that’s not all that’s happening. JuJu Watkins and USC will take on Paige Bueckers and UConn in Portland as the nightcap.

Four superstars. Two Final Four berths are on the line. One history-making day for women’s basketball on tap.

“If I were a basketball fan, I’d be glued to the TV,” Clark said.

“RIP to the viewership numbers,” USC head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said. “It’s going to crush everything.”

Though both games will be broadcast on ESPN, and not ABC, it seems likely that at least one — cough, Iowa versus LSU — will break the viewership record for a non-Final Four game in the women’s NCAA Tournament. Iowa’s win over West Virginia in the second round last weekend shattered the previous record (set two days prior in the Hawkeyes’ first-round win over Holy Cross) with an average of 4.9 million viewers. You could make a compelling argument that Monday’s rematch is the most highly anticipated game in women’s basketball since the 2004 championship game between UConn and Tennessee. Or at the very least, it’s the most-anticipated women’s matchup since, well, last year.

As we all know, the last time Clark and Reese faced off, a whopping 9.9 million viewers tuned in. So, yeah, people will be interested in the rematch. But they should stick around to see the stars in the second half of the doubleheader, too.

As a freshman in 2020-21, Bueckers took home all the National Player of the Year honors. Then, she suffered a knee injury that forced her to miss two months the next season, and an ACL tear kept her out for the entire 2022-23 season. Now, she’s healthy (though so many others on her team are not!) and back to her spectacular self, going up against this year’s freshman sensation in Watkins. They’ll likely share top billing as the sport’s biggest stars next season.

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LOS ANGELES — JuJu Watkins’ hands didn’t feel quite right. They were tingling in a way that seemed unnatural, and when she looked down at them, though they were physically there (all 10 fingers — check; perfectly manicured nails — check) they didn’t feel like her hands. Not the hands that made her the No. 1 recruit in the country. Not the hands that made the marvelous seem mundane as a high school basketball player. Not the hands that signed the first Nike name, image and likeness licensing deal for any high school girls basketball player ever.

She scanned the hallway for a basketball — thinking that might be the one thing that could bring her hands back into her body — but none were in sight. Near her was the tunnel, where at the end awaited the start of Watkins’ college career. She knew the questions that had swirled around her for months would finally be answered once she stepped on it: What could she make of herself and a long-dormant USC program?

“You nervous, Ju?” teammate Rayah Marshall teased her repeatedly the past few days. “Yes,” Watkins admitted. “A little.” And now, it seemed, her hands were in on it, too.

From the court, Ohio State coach Kevin McGuff experienced his own sense of the unknown. His Buckeyes — with their intense pressing defense — were ranked No. 7, a popular Final Four pick with a bevy of returners and future WNBA players.

And yet, McGuff had spent the bulk of his USC scouting watching high school and grassroots game tape of Watkins, something he couldn’t recall doing before. Because it was clear from the moment Watkins signed her letter of intent at Sierra Canyon that she would be the sun around which USC’s every other piece orbited.

Watkins’ first bucket came a minute into the game; her first assist, 30 seconds later.

Whatever jitters existed, whatever happened to her hands in that hallway, dissipated somewhere between the tunnel and tipoff. She dropped 32 points on Ohio State in a nine-point USC win. WNBA legend Candace Parker, who provided commentary for TruTV, said: “USC is in for a treat with JuJu Watkins’ career.”

But the moment that stuck out to McGuff wasn’t Watkins’ scoring. Or her highlight reel plays. Or even when Watkins performed the popular “too small” celebration after finishing through three of his players.

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Our “numbers guy,” Austin Mock, uses advanced statistical models and simulations to project the chances for each team to make it through each round of the tournament. Based on 1 million simulations of the women’s 2024 NCAA Tournament, here is our projected score:

• Projected point spread: UConn -4.5
• Projected total: 137
• Projected scores: UConn 70.8, USC 66.3

What happened Sunday in Portland was not only a shame but an unacceptable stain on the NCAA, which just can’t seem to get the women’s tournament right after so much goodwill has been put in after the embarrassing exposure of inequalities versus the men’s tournament in 2021.

Not all were the fault of the NCAA, but this is at least the fourth controversy this season’s tournament has had since the first round began March 22. The Utah women’s basketball team switched hotels out of safety concerns after reporting racial slurs were shouted at the team in Idaho. The team hotel was 30 miles east of Spokane, Wash., where the Utes’ games were set to be played, a distance that was within the rules but in a city that has issues with extremist groups, its mayor said. The NCAA arranged to move the team after the incident.

“For our players and staff to not feel safe in an NCAA Tournament environment, it’s messed up, and so we moved hotels,” coach Lynne Roberts said.

In NC State’s first-round game against Chattanooga, an official was removed at halftime because it was only discovered after tipoff that she had a conflict of interest. A quick Google search shows that Tommi Paris has a master’s degree from … Chattanooga. Earlier this weekend, Notre Dame star Hannah Hidalgo missed four critical minutes of play in a loss to Oregon State after being instructed by an official to remove a nose ring she has worn all season.

And now this.

It’s time for the embarrassing moments to stop overshadowing what has become an incredible time in women’s basketball, both from a competitive standpoint and the star power in the game. UConn coach Geno Auriemma was right when he said Sunday that this year’s Elite Eight games — featuring JuJu Watkins versus Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese versus Caitlin Clark and more — may end up being the most fun the sport has had in ages.

These players are too dominant, these coaches too passionate for amateur hour to take over what is usually the most entertaining postseason in sports.

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The court used at Portland’s Moda Center, one of the sites for the women’s NCAA Tournament Regionals, has dimension discrepancies for the 3-point line, according to the NCAA. The NCAA said that they were informed Sunday that the 3-point lines on the floor were “not the same distance.”

“The two head coaches were made aware of the discrepancy and elected to play a complete game on the court as is, rather than correcting the court and delaying the game,” the NCAA said in a statement.

The court will be adjusted before Monday’s Elite Eight matchup featuring UConn and USC, per the NCAA.

According to the ABC broadcast, the NCAA notified NC State coach Wes Moore and Texas coach Vic Schaefer at approximately 3 p.m. ET (12 p.m. local time) of the issue. Moore and Schaefer went onto the floor during pregame shootaround to see the discrepancy, measuring out in steps the distance from the free-throw line to the top of the arc.

“The line on the Texas bench’s end was correct,” Moore said after the game. “The line on our end was a little bit shorter.”

Moore went on to say the lines have been like this the whole time they’ve been in Portland, “They didn’t paint them overnight.”

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PORTLAND — There was a UConn fan in the stands at Moda Center on Saturday night who pulled her long, blond hair back into a ponytail with braids in the front, just like UConn star guard Paige Bueckers.

She held up a sign: “Paige, am I doing this right?” and high-fived Bueckers as she ran from the UConn bench back to the locker room.

These days, everyone wants to be like Bueckers, who again starred for the No. 3 Huskies in a 53-45 win against No. 7 Duke on Saturday night that now advances the Huskies to their 22nd Elite 8 in the past 24 NCAA Tournaments. Bueckers scored 24 of her team’s 53 points on a night when the Huskies were particularly short-handed after forward Aaliyah Edwards picked up her fourth foul midway through the third quarter. UConn played just six players all night, but shot 40 percent from the field, compared to Duke’s 33-percent mark, and scored 23 points off 23 Duke turnovers — the difference in the game.

“I don’t know that I have one,” coach Geno Auriemma said, asked for an opening statement in the postgame newsconference.

Duke trailed 23-13 at the half after offense was hard to come by in the first two quarters. The Blue Devils went down by as many 20 points late in the third quarter, when UConn took a 42-22 lead.

“I think it was just crowded (down low) the whole night, so when we did get touches in the paint, there were multiple players in there. They did a great job of bringing multiple players when we got catches and it flustered us,” Duke coach Kara Lawson said. “It was the first Sweet 16 for everyone on our roster and we were scattered to start.”

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There’s always a sign.

Last spring, I first noticed something special was happening when I couldn’t walk half a block in Dallas without running into large packs of Iowa or South Carolina fans. There were also my guy friends back home who, for the first time, were planning their weekend around the women’s NCAA Tournament games instead of the men’s. And all the sports talk radio channels were discussing Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My spidey senses were tingling.

I could feel it in my bones that the sport was primed for a breakthrough moment, though I couldn’t have imagined that nearly 10 million people would tune in for the Iowa-LSU national title game, shattering the previous record for viewership of a women’s basketball game. But I could tell that the barrier of apathy had been broken; these women, that late-game taunting, the sport itself — it’d all be talked about for days and weeks and months to come.

I have the same feeling right now.

Another giant leap is coming for a sport that ought to be growing accustomed to these gains. As we head into March Madness, it is the women’s side of the tournament that is taking center stage. It is the women’s stars who shine the brightest. It is the women’s game with the most intriguing storylines.

And … that’s not even debatable!

“We’ve been on a steady incline,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said during my SiriusXM show Sunday night. “You combine the star power in our game, the fact that you have some of these established stars that fans have really built a relationship with like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink — and then you add in this incredibly dynamic freshman class.

“What we’re seeing is that women’s basketball is a really marketable entity. People love it. We’re in a space where there’s an incredible amount of excitement around it. … It’s something that’s, really, a movement.”

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