The story line of this game was how one coach led a talented but exhausted bunch of 5 players to a resounding victory over a should-have-been-inspired, full, hometeam roster despite a great return performance by their injured star player.
You don't have to be more than 12 years old to see the post-game contrast between a gracious and respectful coach (and he's like that even on the rare occasions when he loses) and the attitude by Kellie. Her defenders can say what they want, but she had an opportunity to use this national platform to say something nice about a true pioneer who has done so much for WCBB, just as Geno has always been supportive of Kellie and never misses an opportunity to pay homage to Pat. Don't give me this baloney about how we're criticizing her for what she DIDN'T say, or that she damned him with faint praise about shielding his players. Doug Bruno has never beaten Geno, yet his post-game pressers are full of grace. To be a coach of a great program, you have to have grace. Geno has it; she doesn't. And it's reflected in the humble words and appearance of every player UConn brings to the dais, whether rookie or veteran. The UConn program stresses maturity both on and off the court. Even the disappointed Seton Hall coach remarked that Geno's talent is not in recruiting great players, but in DEVELOPING great players.
I agree that it was most inapproriate to put Rikea Jackson on the dais after the game. If that wasn't Kellie's doing, then it reflects poorly on the ESPN producer. It was a fitting bookend to what was a most disappointing College Game Day production. They missed an historic opportunity to glorify the women's game by highlighting what the competition between these two programs has done for the popularity of the game over the past 3 decades. Most revealing was the one statistic they focused on at the start of the game. Instead of comparing all the championships, the fact that Geno has by far the best winning percentage of any coach in the history of the game, and the fact that he recently smashed through the barrier of winning a thousand games more than he has lost, they splashed across the screen the total number of victories by Tennessee since their women's program began, compared with the total number of victories the Connecticut program has racked up since they began (not head-to-head, mind you; obviously numbers vastly in favor of Tennessee). That's like settling the rivalry between the Yankees and the Astros by comparing the total number of Yankee wins since their birth (around 1901) with the total number of Houston's wins since their birth (in the early 1960s).
I never really paid much attention to all the comments about how ESPN snubs UConn. But this production really opened my eyes.
