Notre Dame v. UConn in the Women's Final Four

This is an excellent game (Notre Dame leads 49-47 with 12:48 to go in the second half). Every year, about this time, I become convinced that we are all missing a lot of great stories in the women's game because no one does a good job of digging out all of the inside information on these programs and reporting it to the rest of us. For example, UConn's program always gives off the aura of a very happy cult -- the girls all look very much the same from year to year, they always seem to have the same assistant coaches (who all seem to dress alike), and no one ever, ever says anything negative about the program. How did this happen? What keeps it going year after year? I've watched many UConn women's games over the last 15 years, and I still know very little about the whole program.

I understand that in some of the lesser-known sports, like women's basketball, there is a circle-the-wagons attitude that discourages anyone who covers the sport from telling us anything that seems negative. But one result of this attitude is that casual fans like me never get a sense of the behind-the-scenes drama that makes following any sport so much fun. The relationship between Geno Auriemma of UConn and Muffet McGraw of Notre Dame has got to be fascinating -- you can see glimpses of the tension between the two Philadelphians in this article. But casual fans like me aren't likely to ever get a good sense of what it's really like.

In the old days, Sports Illustrated or Roone Arledge would have found some way to dig into this sport and bring its inner tensions to the surface for casual fans. These days, I suppose we'll have to hope that someone starts a good anonymous blog.