Extracurriculars

Toward the end of Tuesday’s story in The New York Times detailing how some schools “fudge” female participation numbers to reach Title IX compliance, former Syracuse athletics director Jake Crouthamel uttered a sentence that has long reflected the sentiments of women’s sports advocates:

“Football is the elephant in the whole thing. That’s the monster.”

He was stating the frustrations that many of his peers have felt in trying to adhere to the law because of the numbers of athletes required for football, which has no female equivalent.

Here we go again.

We’re rehashing some of the pitched rhetoric that has marked Title IX battles for the better part of 40 years. If not for football, this line of thinking goes, perhaps we wouldn’t be seeing some of the startling realities that Times reporter Katie Thomas uncovered about the results of some dubious bean-counting that schools submit to the federal government:

– Male practice players in women’s basketball count as women. Of the 32 participants counted last season for recent NCAA champion Texas A & M, 14 were men.

– Fifteen of the 34 members listed on the Cornell women’s fencing team roster are men.

– More than half of the 71 women listed on the South Florida cross country roster in 2009 didn’t run a race in that year. Some said they didn’t know they were on the team.

– Some female athletes are “underqualified,” with little or no experience in the sport for which they are listed as participants.

– Tight roster limits have been placed on some men’s teams to prevent male participation numbers from “skewing” attempts at reacing gender balance.

And so on and so on.

Some of these practices are not new revelations, especially the last two.

And interestingly, they don’t appear to run counter to federal regulations or NCAA objectives. The NCAA, for example, has actively encouraged roster management (especially in football) as a tool for reaching Title IX compliance.

In the most stunning admission in the story, Thomas reports that deputy assistant education secretary David Bergeron thinks “men should be counted on women’s teams if they receive coaching and practice with women.”

What Thomas didn’t do was examine the premise of the first test of Title IX compliance, known as proportionality, which has had the de facto force of the law since the mid-1990s and which has had athletics directors scrambling ever since. It’s also been the biggest bone of contention by forces advocating on behalf of male athletes who’ve lost their teams when schools make cuts for gender equity purposes.

Neither did Thomas address the subject of interest, which women’s sports advocates loathe and which has become something of a third rail not to touch. The party line is that women are just as interested in men in participating in sports, but they’ve been unfairly held back. That might have been true in the past, but the examples shown in Thomas’ reporting illustrate a desperate attempt by colleges to play Title IX’s numbers game any way they can. If they had been able to find an ample supply of interested female athletes to fill roster sports, isn’t it fair to assume they would have done that? Especially with the constant threats of lawsuits hanging over their heads?

These are questions that beg for answers, but they were not asked here.

Instead, Thomas interviewed the usual suspects in stories like this: Women’s Sports Foundation mouthpiece Nancy Hogshead-Makar; Russlynn Ali, the current head of the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights in an administration friendly to the Title IX establishment; and an indignant university president, in this case Donna Shalala of Miami, Fla.

Hogshead-Makar called these practices a “fraud.” Shalala, a former Clinton cabinet member who ought to have bigger concerns with a new AD, football coach and men’s basketball coach, took the time to accuse schools of “end-running Title IX for a long time.”

Even the Times headline was loaded, suggesting that schools are “relying on deception.”

Except that they’re doing nothing that could land them in court, or run afoul of federal regulators. At least not yet.

Do these “roster management” techniques follow the spirit of Title IX?

Absolutely not.

But neither does the proportionality test, which was treated like a ghost in this story. Thomas later answered some reader mail online, but again passed on the opportunity to address either that or the interest topic, which was foremost on the minds of many commenters on her story.

Wednesday’s unsigned Times editorial was also predictable, accusing schools of playing “cynical games” but remarkably uncritical of the warped logic of proportionality that created the conditions for these actions. There’s an assumption here that women naturally will rush to fill the percentage of sports slots to match the undergraduate enrollment at their schools if only discrimination were ended. This assumption is not to be challenged.

I will suggest here that it is interest, and not football, that is the real elephant when it comes to Title IX compliance.

When I covered these issues for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I once interviewed the newly appointed coach of a newly created women’s rowing team at a major southern university. This was a sport that was added solely for the school in question to get its Title IX numbers right and not invite unwanted litigation. Now rowing is a legitimate and wonderful sport, and this campus was located near an ideal body of water to field this sport, so all of this made sense on the surface.

But when I asked this upbeat young female coach how she was planning to fill as many as 50 or so roster spots, she told me that one method included scouring the campus, looking for female students with long arms and legs.

I kid you not.

She wasn’t particular about demanding any previous rowing experience, or even a background in competitive sports, for that matter. She had to get numbers, and get them fast. Does this not fit the definition of “underqualified?”

My next questions, which I realize were a bit unfair to ask her, were as follows: So where is the interest level here? Where is the groundswell of female students demanding a rowing team? She really didn’t have any good answers, for she was hired only to recruit and coach the team, not provide the rationale.

This was in the late 1990s, and ever since any questions along these lines have come to be rhetorical. UConn women’s hoops coach Geno Auriemma — who’s becoming perhaps the sanest observer of women and sports that we have — was asked about all this by ESPN’s Hannah Storm on Tuesday. He too mentioned football, but also said this:

“Title IX is supposed to provide an opportunity. It’s not supposed to demand that you participate in that opportunity.”

Bingo. This was never the intent of Title IX, which was passed, ironically enough, to shatter artificial numerical limits placed on women in education.

The law must stay on the books and it must be enforced. There are still some serious problems with the proper funding and resourcing of existing women’s teams, as this recent series in the Ball State student newspaper demonstrates. This should be the greater emphasis of Title IX enforcement, not the further addition of sports for the sake of playing the numbers game.

But the 3-part test for Title IX sports compliance is broken, and needs to be fixed. We need a new set of regulations to reflect the status of female college athletes today, and not in the late 1970s, when the test was formulated and when I was in college. It is a very different world now, and a much better one.

Before we can do that, we must also have an honest discussion about women and their interest in competing in intercollegiate sports. The Times is rolling out more stories on Title IX compliance that I hope will seriously delve into this subject in ways the first installment of this series did not.

As I wrote during the Women’s Final Four, there’s growing media interest in some of the astonishing pay scales for a growing number of top women’s college basketball coaches.

During that same weekend in Indianapolis, there were quite a few coaches taken aback by the news that UCLA coach Nikki Caldwell was jumping to LSU after just three years in Westwood, where she had developed a Top 10 program while earning an annual salary of around $300,000. On the bayou she’ll pull down $700,000 per annum with incentives taking it to $900,000.

There are no typos or extra zeroes in that last sentence. The commas between those zeroes are placed correctly.

Caldwell reportedly turned down an offer from Virginia, ostensibly to stay at UCLA, and was seen greeting fellow coaches at the Final Four in what turned out to be her final days as the leader of the Bruins. On the same day the semifinal games were to be played at Conseco Fieldhouse, she had traded in her sparkling light blue and gold attire for purple and gold threads (a move which has West Coast women’s hoops blogger Sue Favor thoroughly disenchanted).

At the bottom of his Monday column, Shreveport Times LSU beat writer Glenn Guilbeau asks a question that likely will persist as this trend escalates:

“Still it is somewhat alarming and mysterious that a coach of a non-revenue sport like women’s basketball, which for the most part has not been very popular here, would make more money than the coach of the immensely popular sport of LSU baseball (though not this season) and as much as LSU’s two football coordinators.

“ ‘There’s a whole series of things that sometimes are hard to explain to me,’ LSU chancellor Mike Martin said. ‘We pay football coaches more than athletic directors, and we pay athletic directors more than chancellors. But a lot of it has to do with the market and the fact that we now have a very strong long term investment in women’s basketball. She is certainly a first-rate coach.’ ”

While “the market” for elite women’s coaches figures to grow, where is any semblance of a plan to try to produce a nominal amount of revenue, or at least try to draw better crowds? Despite being one of the best women’s programs in the country — including five consecutive Final Four appearances between 2004-08 — LSU has struggled to get a consistently good home draw.

LSU has already gotten busy trying to reverse that. Caldwell’s telegenic likeness has already been plastered in a billboard campaign underway in Baton Rouge, and that’s a good sign. The school has a very marketable, attractive and dynamic coach who is being paid a generous salary to procure and develop talent and put a winning product on the basketball court. I don’t doubt that the former Tennessee standout will do this, especially in a part of the country that is awash with talent and the kind of football cash not only to compensate her but also to fund her program.

It’s also encouraging that more athletic directors want to be ambitious about women’s basketball and build winning programs. Hence, the increasingly high value placed on the best coaches “the market” has to offer.

But as Final Four weekend stories by Bloomberg and USA Today also illustrate, the sport is one of the biggest money guzzlers in college athletics. Even UConn, which unlike other women’s programs has its own media deal with Connecticut Public Television, is reporting losses and lower crowds, even with the fabulous Maya Moore matriculating.

The stakes in non-revenue college athletics — men’s and women’s — are rising, and so with this comes the demand for the money to pay for them. Women’s basketball is funded as if it were a revenue sport, but the reality is that at far too many schools there’s not enough “emotional” support beyond the money. UConn coach Geno Auriemma sledgehammered this point during the NCAA tournament last year, accusing too many ADs of not caring about the sport at all, dispensing just enough money to keep Title IX hounds at bay and little more:

“What has to happen is that enough athletic directors and university presidents need to make more of a commitment to the women’s game so they will put more pressure on their coaches to coach better. They don’t put enough money into the programs to demand from their coaches that they play at that level.”

Well, that’s certainly changing, isn’t it?

Perhaps the growing expenditures will prompt some ADs to get serious about maximizing their investment. At future hiring press conferences, I’d like to see them also outline how their departments plan to market and promote the program, offer ticket packages targeted beyond the sport’s fan base of seniors and younger families and get the community more interested in women’s basketball.

Some people I’ve spoken with who are involved in the business and marketing side of the women’s game doubt that separate media deals for women’s basketball, at the school, conference and national levels, will ever come to pass. The women’s NCAA tourney package that includes other non-revenue sports (and that expires after next season) probably cannot stand on its own.

So the pattern of “insane jack” being paid to major conferences in new football TV deals will have to become even more insane. And even if attendance grows, revenue for women’s basketball will be paltry because tickets remain at bargain prices. That Caldwell billboard also advertises season ticket packages ranging from $50 to $125.

What isn’t talked about with any kind of candor in the sport is why the women’s game isn’t more popular, even during the NCAA tournament, in spite of so much television exposure and the money that’s being fed into it. But that’s a topic for another time.

For the time being, I’d like to expand on Guilbeau’s question to pose this one:

How high does “the market” for coaches become in a sport that does not, and probably will not, produce any serious revenue?

Because while the laissez-faire ideal may be handsomely rewarding the likes of Nikki Caldwell, the real economics of this sport reflect a far more troubling, and possibly unsustainable, reality.

Bravo to Sally Jenkins a couple of weeks ago for calling the farcical prosecution of Barry Bonds for what it was while it was going on. And double bravo to Roger Cossack and Art Spander post-factum for saying the same thing on “Outside the Lines” on Thursday.

Even George Dorhmann argues that the jury, after being unable to reach a verdict on three other counts:

“. . . found Bonds guilty of rambling, of dancing around a question, of being (for anyone who has ever interviewed him can attest) Barry Lamar Bonds.”

Yet the feigned moral outrage from The Tribe is sucking up far too much of the oxygen. Here’s a breath of fresh air:

(video h/t Daily Motion)

Update: And Jeff Passan launches into to those waging The War on Steroids:

“The same selfishness that pervaded steroid users afflicted those on the opposite side. The anti-doping fiends profited off the drug testing they insisted upon. The moral police used the time-honored canard – the safety of children – to advocate against PED use. The cops and government turned power into score-settling trials.

“It’s no wonder baseball came out so well. Turns out MLB was no worse than the people running the War on Steroids.”

My “Outside the Lines” appearance Sunday prompted the understandable and passionate response from gay and transgender sports advocate Pat Griffin that I thought it would, although that was never my purpose in saying what I did. I responded on her blog, and I do appreciate Pat being a rare sports-and-gender blogger who opens up her site for commenting. I had my reply, and a few other readers were in my corner to some degree, at least for raising issues that are largely uncomfortable to question.

What did surprise me was the feedback I got from a few coaches and others in Indianapolis at the Women’s Final Four who had seen the program and thought I made some valid points. I do appreciate those comments as well, and I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here.

While I’m not obsessed with this, I do feel it’s important to engage in more than one point of view when it comes to the dicey mix of culture, gender and sports. Far beyond the scope of Title IX (which has made me enough of a bête noire in some women’s sports circles), what I regard as the wasted cultural obsessions of women’s sports (delving mostly into the Kye Allums matter) have not had an adequate public hearing.

Most of this centers on issues of sexuality, of course, and the recent piece in ESPN The Magazine on homophobia in recruiting (always a media favorite, regenerated with a big splash every few years) illustrates this.

But a recent acquaintance sympathetic to sexual minorities in sports put it best to me: It’s understandable that Pat Griffin and Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (and a former college basketball coach) go to the lengths they do to work on behalf of, and give a voice, to athletes who feel without a place to go. But if all you do is focus on these issues, then it does give knuckleheads further ammunition to bash women’s sports.

I would add only that women’s sports advocates also tend to marginalize themselves because some assume their views are more mainstream than they really are, and that everyone else “should” believe what they do. And some who may not follow the party line, especially on a touchy cultural subject, are reluctant to say anything at all for fear of being viewed as intolerant.

However, this acquaintance, as well as other women with whom I discussed some of these issues in Indy, are part of a younger generation that’s not as hung up on these matters to the degree that we geezers seem to be.

So this was all a more intriguing and encouraging experience than I imagined.

As soon as I saw this Tweet from USA Today’s Christine Brennan this morning . . . .

@cbrennansports For those unhappy (disgusted?) with how #womensfinal4 is covered by most newspapers, check out#USAToday sports: http://usat.ly/2QcFT

. . . I realized it deserved the following response. I posted this first on Twitlonger and plan to explore this more in a later post, but this is what I should have told her when I had the chance in Indianapolis during the Women’s Final Four. I’ve edited and expanded it slightly from what I originally Tweeted:

“Print is not the future for women’s hoops coverage. I know, because I covered the sport for a major newspaper for many years. Then the newspaper business imploded. To assert that the mass media will, or should, devote more resources to a niche interest is ludicrous. Especially when better alternatives are available.

“The suggestion that coverage is ‘worse’ because of the decline of print — and the ever-present ’sexism’ that she and her ilk spout like they’re breathing air — is wrong-headed. I’ll blog more about this later, but on Saturday I sat next to Christine Brennan at a Women’s Final Four panel discussion about coverage of women’s basketball, and was taken aback by her dismissive attitude toward the ‘Internet.’ It is not a monolithic entity but the place where coverage of women’s hoops, like most niche topics, can and must flourish.

“Of course there is sexism there, but so what? You make of the Net what you want. It’s not a passive medium like print. This is 2011, but her tone came right from the late 1980s.

“There are two innovations that I’d suggest any fan of the sport, and students of new media, should look at: the Twitter account of @hoopfeed, which is a curated, constantly updated news wire that’s all women’s basketball. There’s nothing like it, and fans can’t get enough. If Christine would check it out, she’d see that there’s quite a bit of coverage of the game, and not just from newspapers.

“There’s also Inside Women’s Basketball, which is a very well-done quarterly women’s hoops online magazine that includes blog posts from Mel Greenberg, who created the first women’s poll in the late 1970s.

“The individuals behind these efforts and I and others have been talking about all this a lot since we’ve been here in Indy, and frankly we don’t have time to gripe about the way we think things should be. The Web, social media and especially mobile is where a burgeoning part of the women’s basketball audience — young girls and women who play the game — gets its news and information. It’s time to go there, instead of demanding they come to a place where few of them will ever go.

“The national dailies like Christine’s and the smaller papers, especially those in college towns, will follow women’s teams most extensively. But the major metro dailies like the one I used to work for are the missing element here. As much as I wish at times that I could have my old beat back, this new reality doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

“Marie Hardin of the sports journalism program at Penn State examined this issue recently in Nieman Reports, but I contend the focus is misplaced. If you’re always going to compare coverage of women’s sports to men’s, you’re always going to be disappointed. Perhaps some people feel the need to find something to gripe about (in women’s sports I call them The Sisters of Perpetual Indignance), but this is the wrong way to approach the subject.

I’d like to ask Christine (and Marie and anyone else who subscribes to their meme) to check out these new women’s hoops ventures and give them her support, but I rarely see her interact with her nearly 7,500 Twitter followers. So I doubt she’ll see this post, or even acknowledge it if she does.”

INDIANAPOLIS — The national championship matchup that few had in their brackets turned out to be one of the better finales in years.

Texas A & M got 30 points and nine rebounds from Women’s Final Four Most Outstanding Player Danielle Adams and shot 68 percent in the second half to down Notre Dame 76-70 before a crowd of 17,473 at Conseco Fieldhouse.

It was the first NCAA championship for the Aggies (33-5), who were  in downtrodden shape when coach Gary Blair arrived from Arkansas in 2003. Notre Dame (31-8), playing in front a friendly partisan crowd, was vying for its second national title, 10 years after capturing its first crown in an all-Indiana affair over Purdue.

Without the more familiar names of UConn, Tennessee and Stanford, some pundits bemoaned the supposed lack of star power.

In what proved to be a prelude to a riveting Women’s Final Four, A & M put out Stanford in the national semifnals after trailing by 10 points late in the second half. Then Notre Dame, fresh off a stunning Elite Eight win over Tennessee, crushed UConn’s bid for a third consecutive title.

“I hope Tony Kornheiser was watching this,” said Blair, referring to one of the ESPN TV host. “Women’s basketball perhaps needed this game more than Texas A & M and Notre Dame did.”

After battling foul trouble and a seven-point lead early in the second half, the Aggies took the lead for good at 58-57 with 8:30 to play on a jumper by Tyra White. But it was her 3-point shot with 1:07 left, and as the shot clock expired, that essentially put away Notre Dame as A & M led 73-68.

“That was a knife in my heart,” Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw said. “That was the game, that play right there.”

The Aggies, who beat Big 12 rival Baylor in the Elite 8 after losing to the Lady Bears three times, then roared past Stanford in the semifinals, looked like they might crack when both Adams and point guard Sydney Colson were whistled with three fouls.

But Adams, the Barkleyesque power forward who shed 40 pounds before the season, stopped taking long jumpers and worked in the paint in the second half. She scored 22 points after halftime on 9-for-11 shooting, putting Devereaux Peters, Notre Dame’s top post defender, in foul trouble.

“I had a little voice in my head that said, ‘Don’t let this team down,’ ” Adams said. “And I just took the game over. I wasn’t going to let my team lose. They’ve been doing everything for me, so I decided to take them on my back and just let them ride on my back.”

Diggins led the Irish with 23 points while Peters scored 21 and pulled down 11 rebounds. They’re part of a Notre Dame nucleus that loses only starter for next season.

A & M parts with Adams and Colson, returns White and starting guard Sydney Carter and welcomes South Carolina transfer center Kelsey Bone and the top recruiting class in Aggies’ history.

“Either one of us deserves this trophy, but we played just a little bit better in the second half,” Blair said. “We found a way.”

In-Game Tweets on @wparker

INDIANAPOLIS – On the massive Texas A & M campus in College Station, Tuesday has been designated as a “maroon out,” in which students, faculty and staff are asked to wear school colors.

A game featuring A & M’s Top 10-ranked baseball team will be moved up to a late afternoon first pitch.

A healthy slice of Aggie Nation will grind to a halt by mid-evening Tuesday as that part of the deep heart of Texas will be euphoric about the rare chance to see their school compete for a national championship in a major sport.

The Texas A & M women’s basketball team wasn’t the only Aggie program that was moribund when Bill Byrne became athletic director in 2003 and made Gary Blair his first hire.

But it might be the most unlikely team for which those students and alumni will be wearing Aggie maroon Tuesday.

When Texas A & M (32-5) meets Notre Dame (31-7) at Conseco Fieldhouse with an NCAA championship on the line, the game will feature two teams that knocked out all the No. 1 seeds in the tournament and deprived a repeat of last year’s final between UConn and Stanford.

“I think I know we screwed it up for ESPN,” said the amiable, but rambling Blair, who’s been here before, with Arkansas in 1998. “But it’s good for the game of basketball right now. Right now for our sport to grow we need Texas A & M and Notre Dame in this game.”

It’s a refrain that’s heard every five years or so, when the dominant powers in the game get tripped up along the way. A & M took care of Baylor and Stanford, while the Fighting Irish pulled off a rather notable feat, eliminating Tennessee and UConn in successive games.

“This is my week for exorcizing demons,” said Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw, who had never defeated the Lady Vols before and had posted only four previous wins over UConn in 32 tries.

In the last two weeks, what Blair and McGraw have done is to give hope that the UConn-Tennessee lock on the sport’s dominance doesn’t have to be permanent.

But since UConn won the first of its seven NCAA titles in 1995, only four teams other than the Huskies or Lady Vols have claimed titles.

One of them was Notre Dame in 2001, when McGraw’s team famously overcame a double-digit halftime deficit to overpower UConn in the national semifinals.

The push toward parity

During most of the 1990s, a number of programs new to the Final Four elevated hopes that suspense in March was just around the corner. UConn reached its first Final Four in 1991, laying the groundwork for a dynasty.

In 1993, the Final Four featured four first-time teams in Texas Tech, Vanderbilt, Iowa and Ohio State. But none of them have returned.

Neither have Alabama in 1994, N.C. State and a Blair-coached Arkansas in 1998 and Penn State in 2000, when the Huskies reeled off the first of six NCAA crowns in nine seasons.

At the same time, Purdue, North Carolina and Notre Dame moved into the elite ranks by winning national championships. Duke, LSU and Rutgers were to follow, but national titles have eluded them. More recently, Baylor in 2005 and Maryland in 2006 captured NCAA crowns with young teams.

Since then, it’s been Tennessee and UConn. That would have been the national semifinal matchup had both reached the Final Four, and the renewal of a bitter rivalry that no longer is contested during the regular season.

“Like I said, ESPN didn’t envision it,” Blair said of the Notre Dame matchup. “But the thing is we’re both No. 2 seeds. We’re both in the Top 10 all year. So what’s the big story? We’ve both done what we were supposed to do all year long.”

Notre Dame’s McGraw thinks it’s been “a good thing to fly under the radar. I don’t think that anybody was talking about us.”

A model to emulate

Beating the elite powers of the sport on the floor on a regular basis, and not every few years, is the only way to reach the competitive balance that coaches and others in the sport say they desperately crave.

And with the onset of recruiting parity in the late 1990s have come commitments to upgrade facilities and lay out money — some serious money — to lure top coaches and provide resources to recruit, travel and win.

Blair makes a reported $800,000 annually, but he’s far from being the higest-paid coach in the Big 12. Baylor’s Kim Mulkey, Sherri Coale of Oklahoma and Texas’ Gail Goestenkors are in low seven figures.

“The salaries, are they justified? You betcha,” he said. “And I want everyone to feel good about their sport. Does a CEO deserve $65 million? Probably not, but he’s still responsible for that company going to the next level. And if he’s earned it, go ahead.”

The Aggies drew home crowds in the hundreds when Blair first arrived. This season, they averaged 6,104 for home games, putting them among the nation’s leaders. Next year Texas A & M will play host to an early stage of the the NCAA tournament.

Blair says selling his program — whether it’s meeting with small groups, handing out tickets or pushing for more media coverage — requires tireless passion and hustle that goes far beyond the matter of “dollars and cents.”

“It’s getting people out to sell it, because I’m tired of going into airports and seeing all Texas and Michigan and UCLA and even Miami stuff,” Blair said. “Now, I want to sell A & M. I do not have to want to explain A & M to a person from Connecticut or Gonzaga. They’re going to know who we are and what we’ve accomplished.”

The best potential advertisement for that comes Tuesday.

INDIANAPOLIS -- The casual observer may find unusual the declarations of “parity” that ring out when two No. 2 seeds reach the NCAA women’s championship game, as they did Sunday night.

Texas A & M and Notre Dame had already broken brackets by upsetting Baylor and Tennessee, respectively, in the Elite Eight. And then they completely shattered them at Conseco Fieldhouse by putting out Stanford and Connecticut, respectively, considered the favorites to reach the title game, and both in stirring fashion.

No No. 1 seeds remain.

“This is what women’s basketball needs,” Texas A & M coach Gary Blair said after his Aggies stunned Stanford 63-62 in one of the more thrilling Final Four finishes in several years. “It needs games like this to be able to sometimes wake up America, to be able to give us credit when credit is due.”

For the second consecutive game the Fighting Irish, who prevailed over UConn 72-63 despite 36 points from national player of the year Maya Moore, brought down one of the giants of the sport. In ending the Huskies’ bid for a third consective national championship, they might have been even more impressive than in their Elite Eight victory over Tennessee.

In order to get here, the last two teams standing had to beat archrivals who had defeated them three times during the season.

“The key difference was keeping our composure,” said Notre Dame guard Skylar Diggins, who turned in a riveting 28-point performance that UConn could not contain. “In the front of our minds were those three losses. So I just wanted to make sure I stayed poised.”

In both games, the winners went right after their opponents’ weaknesses: A & M’s stifling defensive pressure hounded Stanford’s ill-equipped guards all night, although little-used senior reserve Melanie Murphy made a difference for the Cardinal with her ball-handling and defensive plays.

It wasn’t until after she fouled out in final minutes that the Aggies were able to finally erase what had been a 54-44 Stanford lead. The lead changed hands four more times, culminating with a jaw-droppping pass from Sydney Colson to Tyra White for the final margin with 3.3 seconds left. Then Colson grasped Stanford’s desperation heave, as the first upset of the night was in the books.

“While you all were writing, I guarantee you a lot of you already had your story three-quarters of the way written,” Blair said in the post-game press conference. “And now you’re going to have to change it. Okay?”

Notre Dame figured Moore might have another big night in her, but didn’t want any of her teammates to get a hot hand. Because they didn’t, Moore’s sterling career that featured 3,036 points, two NCAA titles and just four losses came to an end.

“She single-handedly tried to will them back into the game,” Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw said. “But I did think we got everybody else to get out of their game a little bit more to force Maya to have the pressure of carrying the team.”

With a very thin margin for error or foul trouble, it worked. UConn used a six-player rotation most of the season, with only one pure post player, Stefanie Dolson. When she got saddled with foul trouble, picking up her third personal moments into the second half and her fourth with 14 minutes left, the Irish went to work in the paint and on the arc, with Natalie Novosel contributing 22 points.

So for only the fifth time in the last 17 seasons, the national champion will be a team other than UConn or Tennessee.

“Nothing’s a given,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “When you play well, you win. When you don’t, you lose. The two teams that played the best today and the two teams that deserve to be playing Tuesday night are the two teams playing Tuesday night.”

That’s a question that comes up a lot in women’s basketball and in women’s sports in general, and it’s one that I find fascinating but ultimately frustrating.

This morning, hours before the Women’s Final Four tipped off in Indianapolis, I appeared on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” program to discuss Kye Allums, the George Washington University transgender athlete who went public with his disclosure before the season began.

As I suggested at the time, cultural issues like this always seemingly trump other more pressing topics in women’s sports, and make it difficult for them to reach a broader mainstream appeal. I reiterated that point this morning and continued to express some puzzlement over a self-identified male who wishes to be true to himself but still wants a place — and a scholarship — on a women’s team.

Those were questions he avoided during the interview, and the lack of candor was obvious. I realize this is a young person here, a college student, and so I hesitate to dwell on this point.

I wish OTL instead had focused on what I think is a much more relevant subject about the women’s game today: The growing financial implications of big-money budgets and salaries for the nation’s top programs and coaches. I wrote about that here on Saturday, and another example of that unfolded later on Saturday.

LSU hired UCLA coach Nikki Caldwell, who will make around $900,000 annually, triple the salary she drew while building the Bruins into a nationally prominent program.

Not bad for a coach with three years of head coaching experience.

As a Twitter follower of mine commented about this, “business is business,” and the money being laid out to purloin hot coaching talent reflects the high-stakes pressures that come with the top jobs.

Athletics directors willing to spend that kind of money understand the women’s game is a full-fledged enterprise that long ago dwarfed narrow social causes but that still generate a very bright — and I think unwarranted — media spotlight.

In what’s becoming an annual pre-Final Four media routine, Bloomberg has published what I regard as the most essential piece about the finances, marketing and outlook for big-time women’s college basketball that’s been written in some time.

But unlike some previous treatment of the same issue — such as this very good Big 12-oriented account by The Austin American-Statesman before last year’s Women’s Final Four in San Antonio — Bloomberg reporter Curtis Eichelberger’s examination goes beyond an emphasis on money and revenues and explores the realities facing those trying to broaden the sport’s appeal.

It’s an effort that’s obviously tied to money, but also illustrates the difficulties that the NCAA, conferences and various college athletic departments have faced in expanding its base audience.

Even Connecticut, which is gunning for its eighth NCAA championship this weekend at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis and has been the only women’s program to turn in a regular profit, is awash in red ink. Top programs are budgeted typically around $2 million to $4 million, with coaches like UConn’s Geno Auriemma and Pat Summitt of Tennessee pulling down low seven-figure salary packages.

A few excerpts that I think are worth keeping in mind, starting with comments from former NCAA women’s basketball committee chairwoman and Atlantic 10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade, a strong advocate for pushing the women’s game in the direction of profitability:

“There is intrinsic value in being able to carry your own weight. For the amount of resources going into intercollegiate women’s basketball, there’s going to be a time where there has to be a rational decision of, is it worth it? . . . It makes a difference whether you make money. It gives you a seat at the table where the decisions are made.”

Yet despite regular marketing and attendance initiatives, that scenario may not not realistic. Ohio State senior associate athletics director Ben Jay:

“I don’t foresee women’s basketball breaking even. We’d love it to. We are marketing the brand and pushing the program and all the fan experience elements. But we don’t see women’s basketball subsidizing other sports.”

The most important issue facing the women’s game from an exposure standpoint may be renewing the NCAA women’s basketball television package. The current 11-year, $163 million deal with ESPN, which includes a number of men’s and women’s non-revenue sports, expires at the end of the 2011-12 season. McGlade is in favor of pulling the women’s basketball component away from the other sports, Eichelberger reports, “no matter how small, and use that as a baseline to set new goals for developing the women’s television product.”

I certainly agree with that. Assessing the true media value of that product is a necessary step away from the current piggy-backing of women’s games that are tied to conference packages. I’ve had a senior administrator at a major conference tell me that it doesn’t place a financial value on its women’s package that is lumped in its all-sports contract. This individual wouldn’t speculate on what that dollar figure might be.

It’s time for this to change, and for the sport’s advocates to embrace what I’ve referred to as women’s hoops 3.0:

“This sport, and others women play, needs to attract more fans and more corporate and media support in order to gain a more durable foothold in a sports world still feeling the effects of the recession. Those with a professional stake in the advancement of women’s basketball recognize that those gains are no longer possible through political and social activism alone.

“The time in which we’re living now — with a concerted effort underway to ensure that women’s hoops, and women’s sports, will succeed as businesses — will help determine whether those young women will be able to live out their dreams.”

Perhaps I’m far too obsessive about this, and I know I will enjoy the games once they finally get underway Sunday night. I love the matchups that are on tap with Stanford vs. Texas A & M and UConn vs. Notre Dame. The splendid Maya Moore will conclude one of the greatest college basketball careers ever this weekend, with Stanford’s veteran squad, a spunky bunch of Aggies getting here for the first time and the fine young Irish point guard Skylar Diggins also featuring.

But the constant backdrop of social and cultural issues is bearing out my obsession. On Sunday morning’s “Outside the Lines” program on ESPN, the topic won’t be the basketball, or anything I’ve addressed here but the issue of transgender athletes. ESPN got Kye Allums, who is a male-identified member of the George Washington women’s team, to sit for an interview. I’ve been asked to appear on a panel discussion on the same program because of what I posted here last fall.

There’s nothing really new to report here, and I question OTL’s choice of subject matter on the same day of the biggest weekend in women’s college basketball, and that’s a point I’ll need to make on the air.

Especially when trying to bring the women’s game to new audiences remains so vexing, even for girls who already play. Says Rick Risinger, the Indianapolis-area high school coach of current UConn starter Kelly Faris:

“Boys have a tendency to watch a lot of basketball, whereas girls don’t tend to watch as much. The Final Four will open up and expose girls to basketball at a high level. This could set off a spark in some girls.”