DON'T GIVE YOUR OPPONENT BULLETIN BOARD MATERIAL.

The women's national basketball tournament wrapped up over the weekend, with Friday's events foreshadowing Sunday's game.

Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark played noticeably lax defense against the then-undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks in the Final Four.

And LSU Tigers players — who face Clark and her Hawkeyes in Sunday's national championship game — found Clark's antics "very disrespectful."

"Me personally, I find it very disrespectful," LSU guard Alexis Morris told ESPN Saturday. "So I'm going to take that personally going into that game."

"You're going to have to guard us," she added. "That's just the competitor in me, and the will to win."

When tasked with defending freshman Gamecocks guard Raven Johnson, Clark guarded her from a considerable distance. At one point when Johnson had the ball outside the three-point line during Friday night's contest, the 6-foot Iowa point guard waved her hand dismissively and continued to double-team South Carolina's bigs in the paint.

The game itself might have been interesting, but contra USA Today sports pundit Nancy Armour, for all the wrong reasons.

Half the people who watched the national championship game were furious with the officials, while the other half was incensed an athlete had the audacity to talk trash.

If you want the surest sign yet that women’s basketball has arrived, there you go.

For too long, women’s basketball – all of women’s sports, really – has struggled for air in the national conversation. There are all kinds of reasons why, and that’s a debate for another day. But for several decades, the score of LSU’s 102-85 win over Iowa on Saturday would have been noted, maybe the fact it was the Tigers’ first national title, and that would have been about it.

I don't know, the impression I got from social media was that curiosity seekers who tuned in were put off by everything that wasn't settled by the players.

Now the women are getting the same kind of treatment the men get, with every detail parsed over and picked apart. Did Angel Reese really diss Caitlin Clark? Or was she mimicking what the Iowa star did just last week? Was this game part of an on-the-job training program for officials? Or did they really think the sold-out crowd and millions more watching at home were there to see them?

In the hours after the game ended, “Taunting,” “LET THEM PLAY” and “The Refs” were trending, along with Clark, Iowa and Kim Mulkey.

These are the types of debates that rage white-hot after every significant, and some not-so-significant, event in men’s sports. These side conversations are what keep games in the spotlight long after the final buzzer sounds, and ensure that interest in sports and the people who play them aren’t dependent upon a single game.

It is a truth universally accepted that the expanded presence of referees in interminable reviews has been to the detriment of the experience, and the very phrase "process of the catch" ought tell you that you've introduced unnecessary complexity into the experience.  We'll get to the specific events, many of which Ms Armour alluded to in her column, in time.

This post is taking the form of a mini-dissertation simply because there was so much going on to detract from the experience of the game, and a lot of it was culture wars stuff.  Iowa brought a team of corn-fed prairie kids, while Louisiana State were ready to go clubbing somewhere in the French Quarter, and let's say there wasn't a lot in the way of inclusive spirit on social media.  A tale of two cultures?

I can’t get over Iowa and LSU facing each other in the women’s national championship game…a tale of 2 cultures 😂😭 pic.twitter.com/ucZSrSARcC

— Erica Castro (E/Cast) (@ecast2308) April 1, 2023

That was before the opening tip, and that social media thread got nastier going onward.  The racial angle is still reverberating in social media today.  Angel Reese, who I believe has made creative use of the new name and image rules as "Bayou Barbie," was the first star of the tournament, and she's not backing down.

LSU Tigers women's basketball star Angel Reese won the national championship and the Most Outstanding Player award at the women's Final Four on Sunday, then said she wasn't concerned about any criticism directed toward her.

"All year, I was critiqued for who I was. I don't fit the narrative," Reese said. "I don't fit the box that y'all want me to be in. I'm too hood. I'm too ghetto. Y'all told me that all year. When other people do it, and y'all don't say nothing.

"So this is for the girls that look like me. For those that want to speak up for what they believe in. It's unapologetically you. And that's what I [did] before tonight. It was bigger than me tonight. And Twitter is going to go into a rage every time."

She's got the ring and the swag bag. The keyboard warriors don't.

Christian Schneider, who sometimes holds forth on national affairs for Milwaukee radio, suggested that timing of the taunting matters.

Virtually the entire LSU team had been yapping at Iowa all game. Which is fun - it got themselves and their fans pumped up. But even after being run through the filter of race and gender, Reese’s behavior at the end of the game was still boorish.

Yes, Clark has done many of the same disrespectful things to opponents. But as in most circumstances, context matters. It is one thing to talk shit to your opponents as the game is going on. This is the nature of competition - you talk, and it puts pressure on you to back it up. And it gives your opponent the chance to prove you wrong.

(This actually happened in the Iowa versus South Carolina game - after Clark’s dismissive wave, the Gamecocks’ Johnson stepped up and nailed three clutch three-pointers late in the game.)

But it is an entirely different thing to taunt your opponents after the outcome of the game has been decided. Clark was likely feeling the worst she has ever felt on a basketball court. To rub it in at that point is cheap and unsportsmanlike.

His parenthetical notes that Iowa's tactic almost bit them. Louisiana State had better outside shooters and did a better job of preventing Iowa's pick-and-roll than South Carolina had.  Now, did the refereeing have an effect on Iowa's big kids being able to work that maneuver?  "The Refs In The LSU/Iowa Womens National Championship Need To Be Investigated For This Technical Called on Caitlin Clark While Letting Kim Mulkey Act Like A Damn Toddler On The Sideline."  That's Barstool.  The more conventional commentators also noticed.

LSU is your 2023 NCAA women's basketball national champion, but it got there with a game that had less than champion-level officiating.

The Tigers' 102-85 win over Iowa on Sunday saw widespread criticism of the refs in charge of the game, for issues including run-of-the-mill blown calls, failing to stop LSU head coach Kim Mulkey from walking all over the court and a bizarre technical foul on Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark.

Things turned surreal on that Clark foul, which stymied an Iowa comeback attempt late in the third quarter. As far as fans — and the ESPN broadcasters — could tell, Clark had done nothing to warrant such attention.

No, you don't show your discontent with a call by swatting the ball off the court.  Too often I've seen talented players in this tournament who have trouble dealing with losing.  That article also includes observations by veteran women's sports pundits who, while not quite referring to Kim Mulkey as a "damn toddler" did suggest she got away with misbehavior beyond the usual working of the referees.

Let's note that Kim Mulkey is a throwback.  Thirty years ago, the big-hair-trailer-park look was more common among the head coaches in the tournament.  That generation of coaches has mostly passed from the scene.

The former Baylor women’s basketball coach may be the only woman’s coach in America who enjoys such freedoms, or allowances. She must have grasped from an early age that winning covers nearly all of the sins we call important, but are usually negotiable.

Especially in sports, because there is no greater counter than, “Yeah ... but he wins.”

It’s usually a “He.” Seldom is it “She.”

Mulkey is the exception, even if she should be the rule.

On Sunday at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, there was LSU’s second-year coach doing, saying, and wearing whatever she wanted. In a national title game.

Stomping on the court. Berating officials. Bullying whomever necessary. All while wearing an outfit that looks like it was stolen from Taylor Swift’s dressing room at AT&T Stadium.

Doing everything that she did in her long, title-winning career at Baylor.

Yes, and taking maximum advantage of the transfer portal and the end of the extra corona shutdown scholarships in doing so, as well as showing forbearance.

Kim Mulkey has known Alexis Morris since she was in seventh grade. Morris attended her basketball camps in Texas and eventually joined her Baylor team in 2017, but their journey together became a lot more complicated a year later.

Morris was dismissed ahead of the 2018-19 season for what the school described back then as an unspecified violation of team rules, which meant the she had to watch from afar as Mulkey earned her third national title with Baylor. Morris eventually made her way back to Mulkey, and she couldn't have been happier as the two of them were part of LSU's first NCAA Tournament championship with a 102-85 win over the Iowa Hawkeyes on Sunday.

Morris was one of the top contributors all season, and the title game was no different as she picked up 21 points, nine assists and two rebounds in her final college game.

A number of the other players were not on Louisiana State's roster a season ago.  But even in victory, the culture wars are interested in Kim Mulkey.

“We always have to look like ladies,” Louisiana State University women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey once said. “Sometimes it’s a pain, but if you want to be a national champion, you have to look like one.”

And look like a lady she did on Friday during Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Women’s Tournament at Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville, South Carolina. It didn’t go as well for her this time, though, as her flamboyant, hot-pink-feather-adorned suit became the butt of many a joke on the internet (mostly) about Mulkey’s problematic history with the LGBTQ+ community. In addition to Mulkin’s [c.q.] very public opposition to COVID testing and masks, many a think piece has been written about her subtle (and sometimes unsubtle) homophobia. She notoriously refused to defend WNBA star Brittney Griner, who played for her at Baylor from 2009-2013 and helped cement her reputation as a winning coach, while Griner was being held as a political prisoner in Russia. When a reporter asked for Mulkey’s thoughts on Griner’s situation”—saying, specifically, “I don’t think I’ve seen anything from you on that”—Mulkey coldly responded, “And you won’t.”

Not only that, when Baylor won that national championship in 2018, the team accepted an invitation to the White House from Donald Trump, and, who knows, that might be even more unforgiveable than whatever attitudes she's keeping to herself are.