Officiating Didn’t Cost Iowa the Title, but There’s Still Plenty of Cause for Frustration

LSU was clearly the better team Sunday, but the refs should have called the national championship game much differently.

Kevin Jairaj/USA Today Sports

DALLAS — Well, here is a sentence that could lead way too many stories about basketball these days:

Let’s talk about the officiating.

The refs did not cost Iowa the national championship Sunday. LSU played better. Teams do not win by 17 points because of officials, and I did not hear anybody from Iowa say afterward that the refs robbed them of a win. And yet, the game was called so tightly, the Hawkeyes dealt with such an unusual degree of foul trouble, and Caitlin Clark’s third-quarter technical foul felt so unmerited, that… well, Iowa associate head coach Jan Jensen said it about as well as anyone could.

“That's not why we lost it,” Jensen said. “LSU is a great team. It just … I wish we would have had more of a flow game both ways. The whistles, the stops—you didn't get to see what I think our team can do.

“We did not lose this game because of how it was called. It was LSU. They were great. They were better. They stepped up and we didn't do that. But I just like when basketball is more of a flow. And I wish that was the type of game.”

The officials were both a smaller and bigger story than they seemed Sunday. Smaller within the context of the game—again, LSU was the better team. But bigger because this whole season has been dominated by conversations about physicality, fouling and a lack of consistency.

Even as South Carolina won every game until this weekend, Gamecocks coaches were extremely frustrated by what they perceived as a double standard around star center Aliyah Boston. But when South Carolina beat UConn, Huskies coach Geno Auriemma said the Gamecocks left “bruises” on star Lou Lopez Sénéchal: “It's just appalling what teams do to her now. And it's not basketball anymore.”

Some of this is posturing. Coaches (especially Auriemma) have always done that. But the national player of the year should not show up to the NCAA championship game and be consistently surprised by how fouls are called. Iowa’s second-leading scorer, Monika Czinano, fouled out in 22 minutes. Its third-leading scorer, McKenna Warnock, fouled out in 25. Clark had three fouls in the first half, and Clark had to play fake defense for much of the game—hands up, pretend to make an effort, but don’t try too hard and pick up a foul. She picked up her fourth in the third quarter when she casually tossed the ball around her back toward the basket before LSU went to the free-throw line.

“I was surprised it was called a technical,” Clark said. “I didn't say anything. It was just for throwing the ball into the basket—you know, rolling it under the basket, where the ref would have been. But, you know, I'm not the ref.”

Ref Lisa Jones told a pool reporter after the game that Iowa had already received a warning for delay of game, and Clark got T’d up because she “failed to immediately pass the ball to the nearest official after the whistle was blown.” But it was so innocuous that most people in the arena probably didn’t even notice it, let alone think it was a technical. This game didn’t need that. The game of basketball doesn’t need that.

LSU led 73–64 at the time and likely would have won anyway. But it was still an awful call.

“I can't comment on the officials,” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said. “It's very frustrating because I feel like I can't talk to them. They won't even listen. That's what's frustrating, is there wasn't even a conversation that could be had.”

LSU coach Kim Mulkey knows how that feels. In the first half, a ball caromed out of bounds off Iowa, officials inexplicably said it went out off LSU, and Mulkey screamed and gestured and turned on all the strobe lights in her outfit and nobody seemed to care.

Now the sport’s power brokers need to have a conversation. What happened Sunday is not unique to the women’s college game, but it is a growing problem in the women’s college game.

“When your two seniors have to sit on the bench—[refs] don't know they're seniors, I get it,” Bluder said. “But those two women didn't deserve it. I don't think so. And then Caitlin getting a T … I don't know. It's too bad. Yeah, it's too bad.”

It was too bad. Not biased: “They were calling it tight both ways,” Clark said. Not unfair: “We let it get to us a little bit,“ Jensen said. The better team won a game that should have been called differently. Iowa was not robbed. But we were.