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You wanted an Iowa-LSU women’s basketball rematch? You got it
Hawkeyes, Tigers hold serve Saturday and will meet Monday with a Final Four berth on the line
Mar. 30, 2024 6:56 pm
ALBANY, N.Y. — The fans, the media ... they’ve been hyped for this since Selection Sunday.
Maybe since last April, when Angel Reese gave Caitlin Clark the finger — the ring finger, to be specific.
As for Clark and the Iowa women’s basketball camp ...
“I speak for everybody on our team, we did not come into this game knowing LSU had won,” Clark said after the second-ranked Hawkeyes dropped No. 17 Colorado, 89-68, in Saturday’s NCAA regional semifinal at MVP Arena.
“We weren’t like, ‘Oh, we want to win to play LSU.’ We focused on this game, we were focused on beating Colorado, because Colorado is a really good basketball team.”
But the Hawkeyes (32-4) were another level, and they’ll need to stay at that level Monday, when they face No. 8 LSU (31-5).
Tipoff is 6 p.m. (CT).
The showdown will be televised on ESPN, and you’ve got to think it will approach, if not surpass, the number of eyeballs that viewed LSU’s 102-85 win over Iowa in the 2023 national championship game in Dallas.
That game, in which Reese approached Clark near the final buzzer, pointing at her ring finger, had an average audience of 9.9 million, peaking at 12.6 million.
“Any time you get to play somebody you lose to, you’re super excited,” Iowa’s Sydney Affolter said. “Any team at this point is really great.”
LSU was a 78-69 victor over No. 6 UCLA on Saturday. The Tigers finished with a 14-2 surge.
As reigning champions full of swagger and snark, Reese calls the Tigers “the good villains. Everybody wants to beat LSU. Everybody wants to be LSU. Everybody wants to play against LSU.”
The early metrics point to Monday as a tossup. According to ESPN’s analytics, LSU has a 50.2-percent chance to win, Iowa 49.8 percent.
“I think the biggest thing to take away is that everything comes down to one possession,” Clark said. “I think that's what our group learned from (last year’s) journey is, we played in a lot of really tight close games, and being able to execute down the stretch is really important.”
Monday’s winner returns to the Final Four; this year, it’s at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.
“It’s another 40-minute game,” Iowa’s Gabbie Marshall said. “We know our coaches will have us prepared.”
Comments: jeff.linder@thegazette.com
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