Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and others elevate NCAA women’s tournament to the best basketball on offer

Did you fill out a bracket for the NCAA men’s tournament?

Good idea. Otherwise you could have found no other reason to watch Clemson and Alabama play basketball.

If those teams appeared on ABC in February, you would have flipped the channel to bowling or a cooking show.

When you have one eye on your bracket, you find reason to care about these games, no matter how mediocre the basketball is.

For true college basketball connoisseurs, the real quality and entertainment this March was provided by women, and it’s not really a close competition.

There is one great team and one great coach at the top of his game in men’s college basketball at the moment — UConn and Danny Hurley.

The college game isn’t turning out the great NBA prospects it once did either. Four of the top five picks in the 2024 NBA draft might go to international or G League players.

You have a budding dynasty in South Carolina, which is 107-3 and averages a 26-point margin of victory over the last three years and will play in its fourth consecutive Final Four.

You have the greatest college basketball player of all time in Caitlin Clark. You have the best local angle and the best player in the country not named Caitlin Clark in Paige Bueckers of Hopkins and UConn, with an honorable mention going to South Carolina freshman guard Tessa Johnson of St. Michael-Albertville.

You have the next big thing, in USC freshman JuJu Watkins, and on Saturday you could have watched Clark, Bueckers and Watkins play in consecutive games.

You even have the best villain in basketball this side of Draymond Green in LSU coach Kim Mulkey, whose confrontational style with her players and the media was highlighted in an excellent Washington Post story that Mulkey railed against before she read it.

And you have the best basketball rematch of the spring, with Iowa and LSU facing each other in the Elite Eight on Monday night in a reprise of last year’s contentious title game.

The women’s game has the most dynamic coaches working in college basketball, other than Hurley, in South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, UConn’s Geno Auriemma and Mulkey.

The two women’s college basketball games that will be played Monday will be more entertaining than the men’s Final Four.

We’ve never seen anyone quite like Clark, who blends audacious long-range shooting, brilliant passing, competitiveness and flair. She’s the greatest scorer in college basketball history, and she might be a better passer than shooter.

When she left Hopkins, Bueckers was known as a brilliant passer who could score. Auriemma has pushed her to be more aggressive in looking for her shot, and she has produced six consecutive 20-point games. Like Clark, she plays with the kind of flair that should sell a million basketball shoes.

Watkins, a 6-2 freshman with a silky shot, scored 30 points Saturday to send USC to the Elite Eight.

The best women’s players have little financial incentive to cut their college careers short because they might make as much or more in NIL money in college compared with what they could make in the WNBA.

So what you’re seeing in the women’s college game is what once made the men’s college game great — star players who stay in school and legendary coaches building programs that elevate the sport.