What We’ll Remember From March Madness

The NCAA season is in the books. Some of the biggest Final Four storylines:

• UConn’s sustained dominance in the men’s field. Their closest margin of victory was 13 points and they only trailed for 5 minutes and 22 seconds of the entire tournament (out of a possible 240 minutes).
• San Diego State knocking off FAU with a buzzer-beater. It’s the first time a team has made a buzzer-beater in the Final Four to go from trailing to winning, which is a delightfully obscure stat.
• The women’s tournament set a record for viewership and everyone agreed the officials did a good job and all the players were good sports. Oh, wait, no, that’s not it at all.

Yes, the women’s championship did draw in 9.9 million viewers. But most of the conversation during and after the game was because of two things: terrible officiating and Angel Reese taunting Caitlin Clark.

There were certainly some rough calls in the game, perhaps most egregiously, LSU coach Kim Mulkey straight up running into an official and getting away with it.

Yet the majority of chatter came around Reese and Clark. You’ve probably already seen this floating around, but just in case, here’s where the rage is coming from.

Keith Olbermann called Angel Reese “a fucking idiot.” Dave Portnoy, the president of Barstool Sports, said she was “a classless piece of shit.”

These men are 64 years old and 46 years old, respectively. They’re talking about someone who’s 20.

I keep seeing people say that Caitlin Clark didn’t do her “you can’t see me” face to anyone in particular. It looks fairly clear to me she’s directing it toward Louisville’s Hailey Van Lith. The two were roommates when they played together on Team USA and are still friends. Who among us hasn’t given a friend some crap?

As far as I know, Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark are not friends. So was it the same scenario when Reese followed Clark around, mocking her gesture?

Probably not, but this entire situation is not worth getting up in arms about.

For starters, Clark isn’t even the first athlete to use such a gesture. Secondly, she routinely talks trash and seems like she can take it back.

Finally, this happens ALL THE TIME. I got someone ejected for talking light trash during a rec league basketball game.

REC LEAGUE! This wasn’t for a championship. There weren’t any scouts in the stands. Which is truly too bad, because I played great.

My opponent was already fired up, and any good player knows when they can get under the skin of someone on the other team. So when he tried to hit me with an elbow as I made a shot over him, I said, “You’ve gotta be better than that.”

He responded by throwing a punch at me. Thankfully, it was while he was backing away, so he missed by four feet. And the official was like, “What are you doing? You need to leave.”

It was fantastic.

If Angel Reese went to the sideline and retrieved a club, then went up to Caitlin Clark’s knee and gave it a whack, sure, THAT would be classless.

But since that didn’t happen, let’s find somewhere else to direct this faux outrage. Congrats to LSU on an awesome season.

Four other random notes from this postseason:

• Miami and Arkansas’s men’s and women’s teams both lost to the eventual champion of their respective tournaments.
• Schools with avian mascots represented five of the final eight teams. Even before tip-off of Connecticut and San Diego State, all five birds had lost.
• If you ever get a chance to attend games during March Madness, please go. It really is such a unique atmosphere, and you’ll likely meet some cool people. I went to the Final Four this year and highly recommend it. I even got a bowl of nachos, but the bowl is half a basketball. A basketbowl, if you will. What swag!
• People will always remember Purdue becoming just the second No. 1 seed to lose to a 16 seed, but personally, this is my favorite moment from the first round. I wish Kevin Harlan could just call my daily routine. “HE POURS ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE. WOW!”