CAITLIN CLARK SHOULD HAVE LOST, BUT A HIDEOUS FOUL CALL SAVES HER

As Diana Taurasi said referees ruined the game, Iowa advanced on a night when Clark shot dismally and didn’t make a basket in the final 7 1/2 minutes, celebrating only after Connecticut was burned

     This story might dishearten you. It won’t be pouring love droplets and salutations upon Caitlin Clark. Rather, it’s about referees who made a hideous offensive-foul call against Connecticut’s Aaliyah Edwards, who is known for two styles of hair but now can say she was double-crossed in the national semifinal.

     Why? Clark needed a crock to let her wondrous tale proceed to the championship game. We see favoritism in sports all the time, and now, such treatment enabled the world’s hottest female athlete to carry on. With five seconds remaining Friday night, UConn trailed 70-69 and was preparing Paige Bueckers for a final shot. Edwards was atop the lane and screened Iowa’s Gabbie Marshall with her left shoulder. Listed at 174 pounds, Edwards had a sizable weight advantage over Marshall, who went flying backwards and waved to the official.

     It was not a foul.

     “My point of view, it was pretty clean,” Edwards said.

     It was called an illegal screen.

     “A great call,” Marshall said. “And I’m happy that it happened because it was a huge stop — and we needed it.”

     And so, on a tense evening when Clark didn’t make a three-pointer in the first half and made no baskets in the final 7 1/2 minutes, Iowa moves into a title game against unbeaten South Carolina. If she wins this time, as dismally as she shot, Clark might win every game she plays. Moments after the 71-69 victory, ESPN’s Andraya Carter said, “I don’t even know if I can say this on TV, but that call sucked.” She soon was joined by UConn’s legendary coach, Geno Auriemma, who looked ready to crush the officiating crew on the court.

     “There’s probably an illegal screen call that you could make on every single possession. I just know that there were three or four of them called on us and I don’t think there were any called on them,” he said. “So I guess we just gotta get better on not setting illegal screens.”

     What should thrill South Carolina’s coach, Dawn Staley, is that Auriemma pressured Clark by hounding her with defenders. Ask Nika Muhl how she bulldozed her. This was the first time we’ve seen Clark struggle this season, and if not for inefficiency from Bueckers, UConn would have advanced. Was this the same player we’d covered with universal adulation? Clark’s fourth turnover of the night set up UConn just before the call against Edwards. All she could say was, “All five of us tonight.” Hannah Stuelke was the star in the post with 23 points, while guard Kate Martin had 11 points.

     Yet, a TV audience of double-digit millions only could complain about the last call. The women’s game deserves better coverage than the men’s tournament, which resumes today, and an offensive foul should be judged the same way. Not when Clark is on the other team, apparently. “Wow, what an unfortunate time to call an offensive foul,” WNBA superstar Diana Taurasi said on her alternate broadcast. “Just know how to ruin the game. Oh my god, that’s terrible.”

     Later she said: “We always talk about, let the players decide the game, especially a benign call like that where you really didn’t affect the player. It’s just tough to end the game like that. You want players to decide it, and we didn’t get that tonight, which was disappointing.”

     In Clark’s realm, after shooting 7 of 18 and 3 of 11 on three-pointers, she’s amazed to have one more shot before the Indiana Fever take her No. 1 in the WNBA draft. “I think I'm just really grateful, I used every single second of my college career over the course of the last two years,” she said of back-to-back championship games. “To be able to go out on top would be super special, but we're going to have our hands full. South Carolina has been the best all year and kind of been at a different level than anybody else. We're going to do the best we can. Just go out and give it your all. There's only 40 minutes left of my college career.”

     And her issues? “It speaks to the journey we've been on over the course of the last month. Not every game is going to be pretty,” she said. “You can't expect us to always come out here and put on an offensive display of making shots and it flowing perfectly. The first half certainly was not that. We went into the locker room and the main focus was, ‘Stop turning the ball over.’ We knew our shots were gonna fall at some point.”

     For some reason, my mind shot back past a quarter-century. I remember a night in Utah when Michael Jordan made his final shot, to win his sixth title, but not before deftly shoving a Jazz guard. Aaliyah Edwards, you are Bryon Russell.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.