Agreed. But I would think a national audience of basketball fans might be interested in a basketball game? What was happening, what were the official calls, showing and commenting on those calls. Who scored, who fouled, who came in or left the game, in a timely fashion. Which team had the ball, even, where the hell WAS the (off camera) ball? Was a national audience clamoring for a 9 minute interview with Diana to 100% pre-empt the game they tuned in for?
BTW complaining about officials and calls is a loser's game; I get that. But even if the lousy calls were exactly 50/50 it never really evens out and it disrupts the game from whatever it would have been, whatever that might have been (we'll never know). Doesn't help when the specific calls have greater impact. Nika had fouls before getting her sneakers tied: she was playing foul-challenged right from the start and even so it was a different defensive game when she was in there. Some comments here "that's just Nika being Nika, stupid fouls all the time" seem not to have been watching recent UConn basketball.
IMO the only reason UConn fans aren't irate over the calls (fouls, non-calls after muggings, the mythical traveling that only UConn seems to do, the OOB calls and no-calls) is because the replays were bizarrely out of sync, sometimes three plays behind, or non-existent at key moments, and the announcers were somewhere else. Traveling kills me because there are always discontinuities, stutters, that technically can always be called traveling but when the ball and the feet are moving they are rightly ignored by the officials, except when they're not.
A team like UConn can have a bad game and lose to a team they are better than, it happens all the time and UConn did not play their A game. But ineptitude in officiating, however random, screws up the thin margin of error this UConn has against good teams and creates a game that is different than what would have been.
