Five Out: USC's historic night, a brawl at the SEC championship and a word on #TashaTough

The Women of Troy bookend history, a word on the SEC Championship aftermath, Caitlin Clark has earned her coverage and more thoughts on women's hoops. March 11th, 2024.

Mar 11, 2024

I wanted to rename the column “10-0 run” just once because the first half of conference tournament week gave us so much intrigue that five things doesn’t feel like enough. If you read this and think ‘hey, he missed something!’ chances are you’re right. It maybe wasn’t missed intentionally but, much like the Oscars, there may be some nominations that you felt were more deserving. Feel free to leave a comment below or enter our chat and we can talk about all the extra interesting topics we got in women’s hoops this week.

1. Dawn Staley’s apology is appreciated but it’s a shame she has to be the one to do it.

By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the clips. A shove from LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson, a push from South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso, a scorer’s table jump by Johnson’s brother and a lot of truly terrible discourse on the timeline. I’m not going to spend too much time on the fracas itself. The only thing that sticks out to me is how bad this could’ve gotten. Beyond a Malice at the Palace situation, the moment between Johnson’s brother and the police officer was a razor’s edge moment in that arena. Afterward, I couldn’t help but wonder if the cop had taken him down or cuffed him on the floor, how Johnson herself, her teammates or people in the stands would have reacted. Beyond the actual jumping of the table, the 10-15 seconds between those two men felt like a situation that could have devolved in ways we might not have been prepared for. Thankfully, and wild as it is to say, cooler heads actually did prevail in Greenville. Johnson’s brother, such as he is, should not be allowed near an arena the rest of March and maybe beyond.

Now to Dawn Staley and Kim Mulkey.

I think many appreciated South Carolina’s head coach apologizing to the nation immediately following the game. A lot of my colleagues in the press lauded the move, highlighting Staley’s class and poise.

Here’s where I take issue.

While I’m sure Staley was genuinely ashamed of the behavior exhibited by her team on the floor, I couldn’t help but feel like that apology was a needless obligation. For better or worse, Staley has to maintain an image for her program, to insulate her girls — largely Black women — from coded criticisms or outright racism. Iowa coach Lisa Bluder’s remarks on the Gamecocks last year, whether she knew it or not, primed this type of discussion. Bar fighters, right?

When the team gets into a situation like this, there is no shield of privilege that can be wielded the way Mulkey so clearly did after the game. Staley has to be the bigger person whether she believes it or not. She understands how the media machine works and what would happen if she stood up and took a stand against Mulkey or her remarks after the game. Instead, she has to accept responsibility while her counterpart gets to sit on a dais unopposed and advocate that Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese be the ones to fight instead.

I can applaud Staley’s ability to be an ambassador for the game in a way that puts her above getting in the mud and wrestling with Mulkey postgame. But I couldn’t help but feel uneasy knowing that Staley’s understanding of the world informed her decision to take the full weight of the brawl on her own shoulders while Mulkey gets to skate and remain as intransigent as ever.

2. Caitlin Clark has earned the saturation of coverage.

Yeah, folks. If it wasn’t time to call it, it’s time now.

Whatever you may think about the equity of coverage and media’s inability to sometimes walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time, Caitlin Clark has earned it all. After a four point first half, the NCAA all-time scoring leader exploded in the last two quarters of the Big Ten Championship. She hit big shot after big shot, from stepback threes to drives in traffic. She involved her teammates in key moments. And intercepted enough passes that she may be considered the best white corner in a state where Cooper DeJean exists. The final line? 34 points, 12 assists, 7 rebounds and 3 steals.

This is Clark’s season and her moment.

Her evolution has resulted in her being someone that impacts every area of the floor and each part of the game. You just can’t watch her without going ‘oh s**t!’ at least a few times. She leads the nation in points as well as assists. And that’s before you get into how much of an impact she’s had on her teammates.

From Hannah Stuelke running in transition to the three point parade led by Kate Martin and Gabbie Marshall, the Hawkeyes play a super fun brand of basketball and are as confident as they’ve ever been in Clark’s four years there. There’s room for all The Temptations on the national women’s basketball stage but it’s so clear that Caitlin Clark is David Ruffin this season.

And I think at this point it’s okay to accept that she really hasn’t done anything to not warrant the coverage. She has yet to shrink in a moment all year. At every point, she’s met or exceeded the expectation. How do you not talk about that? But with that in mind, let’s see what March and possibly April brings.

I know this…I sure wouldn’t want to see Iowa the way they’re playing right now.

3. Georgetown is a late contender for story of the season.

We’ve been talking about the Hoyas for some time in the No Cap Space group chat. I myself have been surprised at how little we’ve been talking about Georgetown this year, success or not. This is a team that, before the season even started, lost their head coach in an unimaginable way. Tasha Butts battled breast cancer but sadly passed on just a couple of weeks before the season was set to start. It was her first opportunity as a head coach after years as an assistant at UCLA, LSU and Georgia Tech.

With just three coaches on staff, the Hoyas had to somehow regroup and try to get a new team acclimated to a new staff and focused on the season at hand. On Sunday, on what would’ve been Coach Butts’ 42nd birthday, Georgetown upset Creighton to advance to the Big East Championship. Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies lie in wait.

These stories are hard ones to tell because of the empathy required in telling them the right way. What’s on display this week is a unique resilience in the face of immense personal trauma and loss. How we talk about the Hoyas shouldn’t be about the sorrow that they felt in Butts’ passing but instead the beauty in honoring a coach that — in a just world — would be leading this program. #TashaTough has been a mantra of Georgetown this year and it’s a phrase worthy of implementation in our daily lives. To be resilient, unwavering and unafraid in the face of uncertainty and the unknown. And it makes this team worth rooting for, now and in the future.

4. Notre Dame is red hot and feeling dangerous.

Notre Dame’s season started with a blowout in Paris. It now enters the NCAA tournament on an absolute heater. They’ve won 9 of their last 10 since early February. Their last five games have essentially been round robin play against the top of the ACC: Two games against Virginia Tech, two games against Louisville and a game against NC State.

Win, win, win, win, win.

What’s more impressive? An ACC Tournament title vs. the Wolfpack with Kylee Watson out with an injury.

Call it the Hannah Hidalgo Conference Player of the Year revenge tour but the Irish are arguably the hottest team in America not named South Carolina. They swarm on defense, hit big shots and manage to hold off runs at every turn. Niele Ivey has been waiting on a breakthrough for the last couple of years having been bounced out of this tournament early in 2022 and 2023. She finally was able to hold a trophy high on Sunday, a career moment for the 46 year old. But perhaps the most meaningful moment came on a TV set, with her former head coach, Muffet McGraw, in tears seeing the success of her protégé. It’s one of the highlights of March so far. The wee lasses of South Bend have done some growing and are now dancing into the Tournament with an unparalleled confidence.

5. The Women of Troy bookend a beautiful epoch of west coast basketball.

You could argue USC women’s basketball built the sport on the west coast. Before Tara Vanderveer arrived at Stanford, Linda Sharp already had a machine in south-central Los Angeles. There were stars courtside at the Memorial Sports Arena. They were back-to-back national champions in 1983 and 1984. The first NCAA power program. The first Pac-10 champion in history in 1986.

Twenty Eight years later, with the conference’s impending death looming over Las Vegas like a cloud, the Women of Troy channeled their O.G.’s — the McGee sisters, the Cheryl Miller’s, the Rhonda Windham’s and Cynthia Cooper’s — and ended the Pac the way that it started: with a trophy in USC hands and a pair of outstretched fingers, one index and one middle.

Fight on, indeed.

There’s more words to be written about this program and the end of the Pac-12. That’ll come later this week. But what Lindsay Gottlieb has done in such a short time is worthy of mention. USC greats have told me how much it meant to have her reach out to past eras of players and bring them back into the fold. Gottlieb’s first recruiting win came with Rayah Marshall three years ago and hit hyperdrive with Juju Watkins this past spring.

Now this squad, from the jocks to the nerds, are firing on all cylinders.

The title game win over Stanford feels like an exclamation point in which the team carried Watkins as opposed to the other way around. And as they cut down the nets in the MGM Grand Garden Arena one last time, the Women of Troy ended where they started: Pacific Coast champions.

Sixth Man: Milaysia Fulwiley should not be forgotten amid the fourth quarter fracas.

Here is a little bonus because I think it’s important to keep Milaysia Fulwiley in the news cycle. The mainstream discourse will be about the fight and I just can’t call myself an honest columnist on the game if I spend one of my five pieces on that and ignore the Fulwiley coming-out party.

That third quarter was everything I thought the Milaysia experience would be. We’ve seen flashes throughout the year, starting in Paris and continuing in SEC play. But in Greenville, it truly felt like we were seeing the next level unlocking in real time. It was fitting that ESPN splashed a graphic on the screen with the next Big Three: Juju Watkins, Hannah Hidalgo and Milaysia Fulwiley.

That, to me, is the future.

We’ve talked a lot about what the post Caitlin Clark world will look like and how the coverage of the sport is based around stars instead of teams. If that’s truly the case, I don’t see how one can ignore South Carolina if this is what the Milaysia Fulwiley experience can look like game-in and game-out. The future is bright. That’s where the focus should be heading into the NCAA Tournament.