NEW ORLEANS — They’ve been underdogs so long that they relish continuing in the role even at the Final Four, and especially after dispatching one of the biggest names in the sport.

The Louisville Cardinals — Undercards? — do have a -2 figure beside their name on at least one Las Vegas sports betting line going into Sunday’s national semifinal game against California.

For the Golden Bears, reaching the Final Four for the first time isn’t as much as a surprise as an affirmation that women’s basketball in the Bay Area doesn’t have to be synonymous with Stanford.

Cal faces Louisville in what’s considered the undercard, both in scheduling and marquée appeal. But being regarded merely as the opening act for UConn-Notre Dame IV disregards what the two programs, and the two coaches in particular, represent for the long-term future of the sport.

UConn’s Geno Auriemma and Muffet McGraw of Notre Dame have 19 Final Four trips and eight NCAA titles combined in a rivalry that will be contested for the fourth time this season — with all previous games Notre Dame wins — and the last time in the soon-to-be-dismantled Big East.

Lindsay Gottlieb has taken Cal to its first Final Four at the age of 35.

But Cal’s Lindsay Gottlieb and Louisville’s Jeff Walz personify a younger, rapidly ascending generation of coaching stars in a sport that has been dominated by a small handful of icons for years.

In her second season in Berkeley, Gottlieb has pulled together a southern California-centric core of players who have endured plenty of heartbreak away from the court, and who aren’t shy about personal expression.

“I’m very secure in the fact that they play for the California across their chest,” said Gottlieb, from a family of lawyers in Scarsdale, Calif. “I’m okay that one of them has a mohawk (starting guard Layshia Clarendon) and another one has pink braids (starting forward Gennifer Brandon). It’s a really unique group that is just comfortable in their own skin and playing for Cal.”

While Walz has been to the Final Four before — the Cardinals fell to UConn in the 2009 NCAA title game — Louisville’s stunning 82-81 upset of defending NCAA champion Baylor and player of the year Brittney Griner in the Sweet 16 still prompted many of the questions during Saturday’s official press conference.

Walz, 41, could have gone all Belichick and rattled off a load of coach-speak and refused to talk about any opponent but the next one. But in savoring the long afterglow of what may be the biggest upset in the history of the NCAA tournament, Walz revealed a glimpse of a coaching style that’s as open and free and easy as it is intense and demanding.

Starting with the open-collar shirts on the sideline, a dramatic difference from Rick Pitino’s pricey Italian threads, because “I can’t stand to wear a suit and a tie.”

“It’s comfortable, I enjoy it,” Walz said of his sartorial preference. “And I’m going to continue to wear it. I’m trying to start a trend, it just hasn’t picked up.”

But it’s his work with high-maintenance, big-personality players that’s notable. While Walz inherited Angel McCoughtry, the mercurial All-American and centerpiece of the 2009 team, he recruited openly cocky junior guard Shoni Schimmel, who hails from the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon.

Shoni Schimmel has fueled Louisville's improbable run to the Final Four.

In the heat of an already-heated game against Baylor, Schimmel drove on the break against Griner, whipped out a behind-the-back dribble, then flipped in an over-the-shoulder layup that scaled Griner’s reach and bounced off the glass and in. When Griner pulled herself up off the floor Schimmel met her, eye-to-eye, emitting something like a primal scream.

“I just had to do the little circus shot because I just mess around in practice sometimes doing it and it worked out for me,” she said.

Which is just fine with Walz, whose younger sister is Jamie Walz, a hotshot guard in her playing days who became a Kentucky high school basketball scoring legend. He said Schimmel’s maturity this season has led to better decision-making.

“She came in with flair, that’s what she does,” he said. “I understand how she plays. I recruited her. I let her play. I let kids play. I work them hard in practice but when it comes to the game, they’re going to take some shots that aren’t great shots. And that’s okay.”

It was 22 years ago at nearby Lakefront Arena that Auriemma and UConn experienced a Final Four for the first time. On Friday, he and McGraw gave Gottlieb what she called “the most genuine hugs” in joining some select company. When asked if he still enjoys it, Auriemma was wistful and sarcastic at the same time.

“Leading up to this is getting harder and harder and harder for me every year,” Auriemma said. “And Lindsay doesn’t know it yet, but 10 years from now she’s going to look back on this this year and go, ‘Man, that’s when it all turned for me. I used to love this game.”

Can the outgoing trifecta of women’s college basketball’s most visible stars attract a bigger spotlight for the WNBA?

That’s what both the league and ESPN are banking on as they held a tightly-staged press conference Thursday to announce an extension of their long-standing television partnership.

The six-year deal, which Sports Business Journal reported ahead of time is worth an estimated $12 million a season, was unveiled along with the WNBA’s new branding campaign and logo.

At times during Thursday’s media event, it was hard to tell whether it was about ESPN’s self-proclaimed commitment to women’s sports more than the WNBA. But it is quite clear that Brittney Griner of Baylor, Skylar Diggins of Notre Dame and Elena Delle Donne of Delaware, who figure to be top three players taken in the April 15 draft, have generated the kind of national press that the WNBA has dreamed about.

For as loaded as the pro league has been since its inception with former college All-Americans and Olympians, their visibility drops during a time of year when most fans (this one included) don’t have much basketball in mind.

The question at the top is one that has been posed many times before. Here’s another one: Remember Diana Taurasi? UConn’s iconic guard and three-time national champion has had a stellar WNBA career leading Phoenix to two titles, as well as three Olympic gold medals and European crowns in Russia.

But as she completes her first decade after college, Taurasi’s feats have largely flown under the larger national sports radar. When Griner joins Taurasi in Phoenix — the Mercury won the draft lottery — will that truly generate a closer look at a WNBA that has been around for 16 years? Griner’s potential dominance in the pros could be as unprecedented as her spectacular impact on the college game.

Diggins has become something of a national sports celebrity thanks to her social media acumen, counting the rapper Lil Wayne (reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated) among her many admirers. Whether she goes to Chicago with the No. 2 pick or Tulsa at No. 3, she’s easily the personality player of this trio. But will that interest wane as she takes her game to the dead of summer, and then overseas, where the real money is earned by female pros?

Delle Donne, the one-time UConn signee, is as pure a shooter and scorer as the women’s game has had in years, and there’s no doubt she can gun it in the pros. She’ll have to learn to play some stellar defense in the W and get used to its rather rugged physicality.

The hope is that they’ll do for the WNBA what Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s arrival did for the NBA — broaden its appeal far beyond the purists.

The WNBA is coming off its lowest average attendance for a season since it began in 1997, and Griner is a once-in-a-lifetime-player whose presence has been compared to that of Wilt Chamberlain.

While reading through some Tweets of WNBA players during the press conference, it’s easy to understand why seasoned pros, most of whom are now playing in Europe, Asia and Australia for their real living, might chafe at the hype.

Most revealing were the comments of Erlana Larkins, a former college standout at North Carolina who plays for the WNBA champion Indiana Fever and is currently winding down her Turkish domestic league season. In response to another Tweet she said:

league has superstars that have proven themselves how can u be a superstar & have yet 2 play in a pro game yet

And this:

Griner is huge & everything but unless she gets get weight up she won’t be as prosperous as everyone thinks

While I groused (only once!) on Twitter about ESPN’s relentless promotions of “3 to See” during the NCAA Tournament, from a business and promotional point of view it makes sense.

At the same time, the Phoenix marketing staff isgiving away tickets to men in an attempt to appeal to a segment of the sports-watching public that supposedly doesn’t think much of female athletes.

Not only that, but the Mercury has set up Twitter hashtags #ManUp and #CureTheCooties as part of this campaign.

Yes: “Cure the Cooties.”

Welcome to the fourth grade, fellas.

A franchise with Brittney Griner coming on board is resorting to a gimmick like this?

While they indulge in the hard sell of “enlightening” men about the women’s game, the Mercury and the WNBA still aren’t addressing why more women don’t watch and become fans. They are dealing in a bottom-line reality that NBA commissioner David Stern has laid out for the women’s league to achieve beyond his departure: To become more financially self-sustaining.

Star power is what got the NBA where it is, so expect a further deluge of ESPN’s “3 to See” branding at the next level. Name recognition beyond what appeals to hard-core fans explains the prominence of Bill Laimbeer during Thursday’s presser. He’s back in the league after guiding the former Detroit Shock to multiple WNBA crowns, and now is GM and head coach of a New York Liberty franchise that has been floundering for too many years.

As Shelley DuBois noted at Fortune.com, three of the WNBA’s 12 teams have turned a modest profit, as well as the league overall. The money per team as part of the new ESPN contract is $1 million a season and that’s nothing to dismiss: “In a way, the cold business of it is heartening: This deal wouldn’t have taken place if it wouldn’t work financially.”

Bingo. The business of women’s sports, especially professional team sports, will always be a sliver of what their male counterparts enjoy, but this is a notable development. Increased ticket sales — not patronizing giveaways — and corporate sponsorships remain just as important as branding campaigns and buzzwords.

As for the new logo, I’ll admit it doesn’t do much for me. Instead of a female dribbling, she is now shooting a layup, which is supposed to signify another phase in the development of women’s pro basketball.

But the less gimmicky the WNBA becomes, the better. If we’re going to have cheesy promos, I’m totally old-school, a hopeless nostalgiac for the funky funky 70s that ESPN reprised in the early years of the league. What’s easy to forget now is how effective these ads were, and how much of a sense of fun they evoked. There’s nothing wrong with keeping that going.

The sport that Pat Summitt helped transform is going through a massive upheaval just as she steps away from the sideline.

The designation last month of the Tennessee Lady Vols legend as “head coach emeritus” added to the more than 60 head coach openings in women’s Division I college basketball in one of the busiest hiring off-seasons in years.

After 27 years as Pat Summitt's assistant, Holly Warlick is the new Tennessee head coach.

While the Tennessee job was immediately filled with the appointment of longtime associate head coach Holly Warlick, Summitt’s departure comes as a great generational shift continues in the coaching ranks.

With nearly 1,100 wins, eight NCAA titles, multiple SEC crowns and dozens of Olympians and All-Americans in 38 seasons, Summitt was one of the last coaches dating back to the days of the AIAW, before the NCAA sanctioned women’s sports in 1981.

All that’s left of that small group with 30-plus years as head coaches are Vivian Stringer of Rutgers, Tara VanDerveer of Stanford, Georgia’s Andy Landers, Jim Foster of Ohio State, North Carolina’s Sylvia Hatchell and a few others.

By the time Geno Auriemma’s heralded incoming class finishes up at UConn, he’ll be in that club too, and he might well have surpassed Summitt’s national championship haul.

The coaching personalities who shaped women’s college basketball in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with greater resources and media exposure, are giving way to a new breed with the additional burden — and I cringe to write this cliché — of greater expectations than their predecessors have ever known.

The money being spent on the sport is colossal and growing. More than 70 Division I programs budgeted at least $2 million for women’s basketball for the 2010-11 season, with 30 of those earmarking at least $3 million. (As these numbers indicate, 228 of the 338 D1 schools are into seven-figure spending.)

Summitt and Auriemma have led the pack of a handful of million-dollar coaches. The next one figures to be Kentucky’s Matthew Mitchell, who signed a nearly $8 million extension last week that makes him the highest-paid coach in the SEC. A good BCS job pays in the mid-six figures these days, as Purdue coach Sharon Versyp’s extension last week revealed.

The number of schools getting serious about women’s basketball increases. Just in my backyard in the ACC, Duke and Maryland remain strong, but in recent years Georgia Tech and Miami have burst on the scene, with hungry, extremely energetic and ambitious coaches in MaChelle Joseph and Katie Meier, respectively.

College stars in their playing days in the early NCAA era, as coaches they truly enjoy recruiting and have relished building national powerhouses despite what were seen as difficult odds. Joseph and Meier are 40ish, part of a generation of Title IX beneficiaries primed to step forward and command the coaching spotlight.

Miami coach Katie Meier, a former playing standout at Duke. (Photo by Arlene Langer, IDI Sports)

Yet some highly accomplished coaches not much older than them are hitting the wall. Gail Goestenkors cited burnout as a factor in her decision to resign from Texas after five seasons. Here’s a million-dollar coach whose enormous expectations for herself and the iconic Longhorns program may have been unrealistic, given the national championship success of Baylor and Texas A & M.

When Nell Fortner stepped down at Auburn in March, three years removed from an SEC title, she talked about wanting to get on her paddleboard and “swim with the dolphins” to re-energize herself, if not as a coach for now, then just as a human being.

These women are in their mid-to-late 40s to early 50s. So am I. It’s an interesting age, as you receive notification that you’re eligible to join the American Association of Retired Persons, but you don’t really feel old. You certainly don’t have any desire to retire, even if you could afford it.

But rapid changes in so many fields, especially mine in the media, can have the effect of making you feel more antiquated than you know you are.

These coaches have worked extremely hard, made sacrifices, done everything right, certainly won enough and have been excellent representatives for their profession and their athletic departments.

Their resignations also may be viewed as two coaches who ran into some rare adversity in their careers, and decided to say goodbye to all that.

Regardless, the energy level that’s required to get ahead in the women’s coaching profession now is heading off the charts.

For several years now, the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association has scheduled sessions on “work-life balance” at its national convention. Head coaches and assistants alike openly bemoan the non-stop pace of travel, compounded by social media and text message communication that make it easier than ever to stay in touch with recruits. And make it harder than ever to get off the grid.

Last season Arizona State head coach Charli Turner Thorne wasn’t around at all, taking a nine-month unpaid sabbatical to spend more time with her children. She’s set to return in the coming season, her respite cited as a symbol of the relentless grind the women’s coaching life has become.

This toll is being felt by more than coaches. In response to criticisms of Baylor coach Kim Mulkey and the NCAA sanctions imposed on the recent national champions, Brad Wolverton of The Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned a 2010 NCAA survey that reflected growing player dissatisfaction in women’s basketball. The blame was placed primarily on coaches, with their increasing demands on the time of players listed as a major factor.

With increasing salaries come more pressure to win. The growing pains of the women’s game, now 30 years into the NCAA area, have reached this point, and there are varying opinions on whether this is a good thing. As WBCA CEO Beth Bass noted last year, for some coaches this moment may be a breaking point:

“You have to be careful what you wish for. You have to be careful of the devil at the bottom of the wishing well. … You’re going to be held to the same standard as on the men’s side. We have make sure we’re ready to go for what comes with that.”

That these concerns are ramping up as Summitt takes her leave as an active coach is more than ironic. The sheer force of her will and personality has been widely hailed in tributes, including corners of the sports media that don’t pay much attention to women’s basketball. Her decision nearly brought a champion NBA coach to tears. Summitt transcended her sport as perhaps no other woman has, with the exception of Billie Jean King.

When Summitt said at the formal announcement of her emeritus status that coaching basketball has been “the great passion of my life,” it was more than an understatement. The most driven individual in the history of the women’s game has simply had no equal in that department.

So many young coaches have cited her as a role model, mentor and even a reference. Meier has never forgotten the good word that Summitt put in for her as she interviewed for an assistant’s position at Tulane, her first full-time coaching job. Will this reaching out continue as the stakes get higher? As ESPN.com’s Dana O’Neil wrote last week, old-school coaches on the men’s side are lamenting the loss of tight-knit relationships and even friendships.

The frosty relationship between Auriemma and Summitt that led to the cancellation of the UConn-Tennessee rivalry thawed a bit at the Final Four, as they were seen visiting courtside on the open practice day. Auriemma, like Summitt, is in his late 50s. His personality, drive and vision carry on. So does Mulkey, who’s about to turn 50.

There’s budding 40-and-under coaching talent in every corner of the country, including unexpected ones.

But who’s got the outsized personality and ridiculous drive and energy level that Summitt demonstated for nearly four decades, and that is needed more than ever to accommodate the increasing demands of her beloved profession?

That’s a question that has no easy answer now.

DENVER — Ken Starr was thumbing his smartphone as Kim Mulkey speculated about the response to Baylor’s NCAA women’s basketball championship Tuesday night.

“At Baylor they used to not let the Baptists dance,” Mulkey said. “I’ll bet they’re dancing now.”

Kim Mulkey with daughter Makenzie, a Baylor team member, and son Kramer.

Starr, the Baylor president, guffawed with the audience of reporters as Mulkey, perhaps more than anything else, just wanted to take a deep breath and relax.

Baylor had just flattened Notre Dame 80-61 in one of the most dominating defensive performances in NCAA history.

The Lady Bears became the seventh NCAA women’s team to go undefeated and the first to go 40-0. National player of the year Brittney Griner was in devastating form, with 26 points, 13 rebounds and 5 blocked shots.

With Griner and the nucleus of Baylor’s team, including another punishing defender, All-American point guard Odyssey Sims, returning next season, Baylor is occupying the space normally reserved for UConn and Tennessee.

And having to answer a similar battery of questions. Such as:

How do you top perfection?

“You’re making me embrace this now instead of letting me enjoy this,” Mulkey said. “We’re going to embrace it. I don’t think you guys are going to let me hide it.”

She could have been excused for sounding exasperated, but if she did, Mulkey hid it well. All season long she urged her players to get comfortable with being the strong favorite to win the title. Along the way, Lady Bears took down Notre Dame, Connecticut, Tennessee, a rugged Big 12 Conference, Tennessee again in the Elite 8, Stanford in the national semifinals and the Fighting Irish for a second, and convincing, time.

Yet the Irish trailed only 34-28 at halftime. Griner had just nine points as Baylor couldn’t take advantage of foul trouble to center Devereaux Peters and poor shooting from its backcourt trio that keyed Notre Dame’s semifinal win over UConn.

All that changed in the second half as Griner went to work on the Irish, with Peters sitting down with four fouls. She reeled off 11 points in a nearly four-minute span midway in the period as the Lady Bears pulled out to a 69-50 lead.

Amid the flurry was a splendid sky hook shot from right side of the basket, as smooth as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and just as effective. Baylor, which shot a sizzling 63 percent in the second half, got 19 points from Sims and 12 from Destiny Williams.

“When I hit that little hook, it just got me energized,” Griner said. “I was kind of shocked it went in, but it definitely got me going.”

A shell-shocked Notre Dame (35-4), which lost to Texas A & M in last year’s championship game, got 20 points from its All-American guard, Skylar Diggins, but little else. The Irish simply had no answer for the 6-foot-8 Griner, who was named the Most Outstanding Player at the Pepsi Center.

“I think she’s one of a kind,” Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw said. “I think she’s like a guy playing with women. There are so many things that she can do that I’ve not seen a lot of women [do].”

McGraw’s comments were amplified on ESPN and greeted by some on social media outlets with contempt (the team’s publicist issued a clarified statement by McGraw on Twitter), but not by Griner. “I definitely take it as a compliment,” she said.

While Baylor’s exploits set a new mark in NCAA annals, this team isn’t the first to win 40 games in a season. In 1979-80, Louisiana Tech notched a 40-5 record, getting extra games in a state tournament that was a hallmark of the AIAW era, and winning a third place national consolation game.

That was the season before Mulkey’s arrival as a player. In her first two seasons, the Lady Techsters absolutely dominated, going a combined 69-1 and winning AIAW and NCAA national titles.

As a coach, Mulkey has Baylor poised for similar greatness. She’s not picky about a won-loss record as long as she gets the same result next season.

“If we lose two,  three, four, five or we go 30-10, I don’t care. But that’s what we want, another national championship.”

As for another national championship coach who’s already expressed the desire to aim for perfection, Mulkey offered a brief thought, perhaps in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for vein:

“I saw Calipari wants to go undefeated. Good luck to him.”

I had no sooner pushed the button on yesterday’s post on the issue of gender and coaching women’s basketball than ESPN The Magazine, as part of the Worldwide Leader’s flood the zone Title IX coverage, published “The Glass Wall” on the same topic, but that reached an entirely different conclusion.

Written by Luke Cyphers and Kate Fagan, a former basketball player at Colorado, this very long piece examines the dearth of women in the college coaching ranks, why so many more men are itching to coach women’s teams and what happens to women coaches who fight for gender equity.

As I Tweeted upon first reading this, I thought this was a crock, and at so many levels. After several more closer readings, it is sadly nothing more than the dogma of recycled, decades-old cultural grievances from a handful of women’s advocates. Cyphers and Fagan have provided an updated shine, designed to give the impression that the professional prospects for women coaches are grimmer now than ever.

This claptrap has been peddled by women’s advocates since the demise of the AIAW in the early 1980s. It is less about the development of women’s sports than the careerism of adult women, whose interests and desire for power have always been more paramount than the athletes under their charge.

There is quote after mournful quote of women coaches, administrators, academics and even NCAA officials about how it’s unthinkable that women will ever have a chance to coach men as they watch men easily cross the line in the opposite direction.

Cyphers and Fagan “report” these disparities with skimpy “research” conducted by advocates who have an axe to grind. It is astonishing in its willingness to swallow whole a fallacious ideology, and even more astonishing for the serious journalistic questions it does not pose.

It wasn’t until the 43rd paragraph — the 43rd! — that I finally came across the lead, as we say in the journalism business. Here it is in full:

“Athletic directors who spoke with espnW for this story say they consistently receive significantly more applications from men for all coaching vacancies. ‘There isn’t a job that’s not dominated by male applicants,” says [former Notre Dame and Northwestern women's basketball coach Mary] DiStanislao.’ “

The writers try to explain this away, blaming long-standing sexism and homophobia in an intolerant male sports culture as the real culprit for the lower-than-desired numbers. To prove their point, they simply quote the aggrieved, with no other point of view evident or even possible. Here’s Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights:

“When you look at the decline in the percentage of women coaches, sexual orientation has a lot to do with it.”

What else is she going to say?

The poster child of the persecuted woman coach in “The Glass Wall” is former Oregon women’s basketball coach Jody Runge. The story severely downplays the fact that Runge was a polarizing figure within the Oregon athletic program, and within her own team, for many more reasons than pushing for better support for women’s sports. There’s an excellent book on the subject that illustrates the complexities of her time there. To hoist her as a victim of a female-unfriendly environment is misleading, at the very least.

This story’s treatment of gender equity issues at Fresno State also does not tell the full story, some of which I wrote about last summer. While there certainly was a high degree of gender-based hostility within that athletic department, this is not a one-way street. There was too much mistrust and animosity going back and forth to blame one side as the source of the problem.

Curiously, none of the women coaches quoted by Cyphers and Fagan talk about whether they’ve expressed an interest in coaching a men’s team, or even applied. Surely the writers should have known that Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer’s name was bandied about in the early 1990s for men’s openings. Did they bother to ask her about it?

Here’s another glaring omission from this story: In women’s basketball, men are quite often more willing to take a job at a mid-major or small-conference program and work their way up. While an increasing number of women are doing the same thing, those women touted as the “hot young coaches” are primarily top assistants at BCS-level programs, usually in charge of recruiting and waiting for their first head coaching job, ideally at another major school.

Cyphers and Fagan can’t be bothered to question this further, nor to mention that the percentage of male coaches abounds most notably at the lower college, high school and AAU levels. Are more women not willing, or just not interested, in starting out at the very bottom? Have they been encouraged by women’s sports leaders to aim higher before they may be ready? Are they being properly prepared for the rigors of contemporary coaching by their mostly female mentors? These questions also do not seem to have been asked.

During the 1990s there was a concerted effort to hire women as much as possible. Starting in the last decade, athletics directors have been hiring coaches, regardless of gender, who they believe will win. It’s a cold bottom line, but it’s a trend that figures to escalate.

To continue to blame the same old bogeymen for the changing nature and demands of the coaching profession is to continue to fight the past. “The Glass Wall” perpetuates a narrative of unwarranted victimology that ESPN, with its earnest diligence to chronicle “The Power of IX,” has gotten badly wrong.

The moves of Wisconsin-Green Bay coach Matt Bollant to Illinois and Bowling Green’s Curt Miller to Indiana this week raised a different set of eyebrows than they might have a decade or so ago.

In leaving established, NCAA-successful women’s mid-major teams for long-downtrodden Big Ten programs, Bollant and Miller represent the kinds of hires some athletics directors are favoring these days: Individuals with demonstrated success as head coaches at a different level of the sport.

This hasn’t completely replaced the trendy practice of hiring top assistants — notably recruiters — at elite programs but who haven’t been head coaches. That approach worked at UCLA, which hired then-Tenneseee assistant Nikki Caldwell three years ago, and at LSU, which in turned hired her away from Westwood last spring. All along, her name has been in the conversation of who may become Pat Summitt’s eventual successor.

Miller, who took Bowling Green to the Sweet 16 in 2007, is getting an annual base salary of $275,000 at Indiana, which frankly hasn’t seemed very committed to women’s basketball. His press conference on Wednesday, at the Hoosiers’ splashy new basketball practice and office complex with his new team in attendance, appears to signal a significant change in emphasis in a basketball-mad state.

As Graham Hays of ESPN/espnW notes, there’s also the subject of gender, as two males are replacing females:

“There is a larger systemic problem in American sports when it comes to women and coaching. As an example, consider the world of Division I college basketball. An aspiring male coach coming out of college has more than 600 head-coaching positions theoretically available to him down the road — all of those in both men’s and women’s basketball. Given that we don’t seem any closer to women coaching men’s basketball, an aspiring female coach coming of college has half that number of opportunities when she looks into the future.

“Aspiring female teachers aren’t limited to all-girls schools. Aspiring female doctors aren’t limited to practices that see only women. But when it comes to basketball, it’s accepted as a societal norm that aspiring female coaches will work only within their gender. In turn, that reality creates understandable pressure within women’s basketball to promote, literally and figuratively, women coaches. If only half of the coaching positions available to women in the first place are actually held by women, what incentive is there to go into coaching?”

During the 1990s, it would have been extremely difficult for Bollant or Miller even to be interviewed for these jobs. Back then, aspiring assistants like Tom Collen at Arkansas and mid-major head coaches like Bill Fennelly at Toledo wondered if they would get a fair chance to move up.

This was a time of highly-charged Title IX litigation that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and the publication of books alleging that macho football was a hindrance to women’s progress in sports and a menace to women in society. Sentiments were running high that women needed to be considered for virtually every major opening, to seriously begin cracking “the glass sneaker.”

Collen eventually led Colarado State to an Elite 8 (with Miller as an assistant), then moved to Louisville and this season guided Arkansas to the NCAAs. Fennelly also moved up, to Iowa State, which was an atrocious job when he arrived in 1995 but he has since taken it to multiple NCAA tournaments and crafted a national attendance leader.

While Hays makes some good points about the limitations on women in coaching, there are a few other factors involved. I can think of a few young women who played the game at major programs, got into coaching and left the business. One simply wanted to go into private business, and while she attends the Women’s Final Four and keeps close ties to people in the sport, she hasn’t looked back. Another was a star on a Final Four program, was given the heady responsibility of recruiting, but she also left for the private sector. She wanted to get away from the hectic lifestyle of constant travel and relentlessly chasing after high school players.

Another young woman played at a BCS school and became a recruiting coordinator at a conference rival, helping it reach the national elite, before crashing out a few years ago. She now coaches a high school girls team, but as she started out she embodied everything women’s sports leaders prized in a future coach.

Coaching burnout in the women’s game is becoming a more prevalent topic, especially with the resignation of Gail Goestenkors at Texas. Various reports last night indicated that former Longhorns assistant Karen Aston, who’s been at Charlotte and now North Texas, has interviewed for the position. Her Texas connections are seen as a plus, something Goestenkors didn’t have and which cost her in recruiting.

While there will be those who grouse that there aren’t more women coaching, athletics directors who invest millions in a money-losing sport want at least to get something of a return on that investment by hiring coaches they think will be the right fit. Whether it’s male or female, black or white, mid-major or BCS assistant, the choice generally comes down to some very bottom-line factors: Will this person win? Will they represent what we want to embody?

I’ve long believed that the game needs all of the very best coaches it can get. So many men like Bollant and Miller have worked in dedicated obscurity in women’s basketball for so many years. Now they’ll get their chance to show what they can do at the top level.

If they’re as good in the Big Ten as they’ve shown elsewhere, this can only be a good thing for the sport.

If you’ve been tuning in women’s college basketball the last few days, do not adjust your set.

The pink uniforms you see for many teams — and it is a rather loud shade of pink in some cases — are in honor of the late N.C. State coach Kay Yow and the battle against breast cancer she fought so bravely and gracefully.

The “Play 4Kay” campaign has turned into a nice late-season attendance booster. But at its core, it’s a unifying cause that — unlike the recent controversy involving the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood — has no divisive political overtones.

While pink has long been associated with breast cancer awareness, it was only a few years years ago that the very same color was at the center of some trumped-up notoreity in one of the most embarrassing examples of sports feminism gone awry.

In 2005, two female law professors at the University of Iowa complained about the pink visitors locker room at Kinnick Stadium, claiming the color was misogynistic and homophobic in the context of a macho football environment. “I want the locker room gone,” demanded one of them, saying the paint job — which included the carpets and the urinals — might even violate Title IX.

The other professor blogged about it along similar lines, endured some nasty threats and eventually left flyover country to write up her impressions after returning to the safe shores of the East Coast. She also pens an establishment Title IX blog, where there’s no mention of her dubious cultural obsession.

I wonder what she and her cohort think now when they see pink slathered all over the signature women’s college sport — even for a worthy cause. Or even when NFL players do the same thing.

When longtime Old Dominion women’s basketball coach Wendy Larry resigned on Tuesday, it didn’t come as a surprise. Athletics director Wood Selig announced several weeks ago that he was not going to extend her contract beyond the 2011-12 season.

Larry, who was an assistant on the great Old Dominion AIAW national championship teams that featured Nancy Lieberman and Anne Donovan in 1979 and 1980, got the Lady Monarchs to the NCAA title game in 1997 and as far as the Elite Eight in 2002.

But that’s a lifetime ago in the rapidly pressurizing world of big-time women’s college basketball. Even at Old Dominion, which had dominated the Colonial Athletic Association until recently, the wishes of a new AD have resulted in a rather quick and contentious change at the top. After 24 mostly winning seasons as head coach at her alma mater, but no NCAA appearances sinc 2008, Larry will see out that last year in a fundraising role.

Selig, who replaced the venerable Jim Jarrett, one of the most passionate ADs for women’s college basketball shortly after the advent of the AIAW era and after it was ushered into the NCAA age, is operating in a very different time. He stepped down from his position on the NCAA women’s basketball committee last year to take the Old Dominion job, which came with a new football program that Jarrett had created in one of the most competitive mid-major conferences in the country.

Larry’s departure wasn’t a pretty one, and is the latest casualty in a busy spring clearance of coaches whose careers have dated back to AIAW times. Debbie Ryan of Virginia and Naismith Hall of Famer Van Chancellor at LSU also were edged out, also unwillingly but a little more gracefully, replaced by younger coaches with fresh recruiting success.

The notables remaining from that pre-NCAA era can essentially be counted on less than both hands: Pat Summitt of Tennessee, Vivian Stringer of Rutgers, Tara VanDerveer of Stanford, Andy Landers of Georgia, Sylvia Hatchell of North Carolina, Jim Foster of Ohio State and Gary Blair of Texas A & M, who last month, at the age of 65, became the oldest coach to win an NCAA title.

In the last decade and a half in particular, the stakes in major women’s college basketball have grown dramatically higher. More schools are getting ambitious about the sport, which has been a good thing, although parity at the very top levels of the game remains elusive. With those ambitions have come bigger salaries — in some cases, astounding pay checks — along with more intense pressure to win. That in turn has ratcheted up a recruiting scene that doesn’t have as deep a talent pool as the men’s game.

And the usual suspects are again scoring big in the current chase for the best high school stars: UConn, Tennessee, Stanford, Duke, etc. Texas, which is desperately trying to elbow its way back into the national picture, had its heart broken last week when a coveted in-state recruit reneged on a verbal commitment and after considering UConn, said she would play at A & M.

What have you won for me lately?

The realities of these greater demands have become enough of a concern that for the last few years, the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association has scheduled roundtable discussions at its Final Four convention to address issues of work/life balance. The money is alluring, but, says WBCA chief executive officer Beth Bass, it also comes with a much steeper price:

“You have to be careful what you wish for. You have to be careful of the devil at the bottom of the wishing well. . . . You’re going to be held to the same standard as on the men’s side. We have make sure we’re ready to go for what comes with that.”

What’s required to be an accomplished head coach while trying to raise a family recently prompted Arizona State’s Charli Turner Thorne to take an unpaid leave of absence for all of next season so she can devote more time to her three young sons.

Not only is that an unprecedented move given her employment at a school in a BCS conference, but Turner Thorne is still in her 40s. She’s one of the younger ones. She’s also richly successful, with nearly 300 wins in 15 seasons, including an Elite Eight finish three years ago.

She’ll miss the first season in the expanded Pacific 12 Conference, which is basking in the glow of a new $3 billion TV contract with ESPN and Fox Sports, the richest ever for a college sports conference. As that was being negotiated, commissioner Larry Scott, formerly the head of the Women’s Tennis Association, said women’s basketball could turn a profit — someday. After the jaw-dropping terms of the new media deal were unveiled, including the addition of a Pac 12 Network, Scott also called it a “turning point” for women’s athletics because of the massive boost in exposure that’s certain to come.

While he acknowledged this development may take years — decades seems more likely — Scott must address first the lack of competitive balance in what has been the Pac 10 and the lowly attendance numbers that have come with it, even at powerhouse Stanford.

But at least he’s stating something that’s rarely heard in his lofty circle of college athletics. He’s raised a very high bar, but it’s one well worth talking about and pursuing at all levels of the sport. Perhaps he can persuade ADs in his conference and elsewhere to do more than just throw money at the game. They need to put more of what I like to call “emotional” support into it, much like Jarrett did at Old Dominion, before money became the element it is now.

Marketing, promoting, boosting attendance and concerted efforts to make women’s hoops a little more commercially viable are lacking, and have been for years. The aggressive young coaches who are getting the plum jobs — and the money and the pressure to win — are in prime position to improve the product, and to broaden its appeal off the court as well. It’s the only environment they’ve known.

Yet the downside of this — the loss of loyal, dedicated coaches like Larry who have struggled to keep up — also needs to be acknowledged. The women’s game is changing — on balance, I think for the better — but some of its finest ambassadors are feeling just than a little more than displaced.

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.

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.”