Doug Feinberg | AP National Women's Basketball Writer

Getting to know yourself can be a lifelong process, especially since you're always growing and changing.

Therapy is all about deepening that self-awareness, because sometimes you don't know what you really want until you talk things through. BetterHelp connects you with a licensed therapist online who can take you on that journey of self-discovery from wherever you are. Visit BetterHelp.com slash positive today to get 10% off your first month.

That's BetterHELP.com slash positive. Ah, hammock. Check. Arnold Palmer.

Check. Motorized solar shades. Yes, please. Get your home and patio spring ready with brand new custom window coverings from Blinds.com. Blinds.com is the easiest way to upgrade your home with custom window treatments. You can even stay in the hammock while Blinds.com handles the install. Just click Installation at checkout and relax while we do the work for you. No matter how many window treatments you order, installation is always one low cost.

Need help choosing? Talk to a Blinds.com design expert for free to help you make the best selection from classic shutters to outdoor roller shades and more. With over 25 million windows covered, you can rest easy with Blinds.com's 100% satisfaction guarantee. See why Blinds.com is the number one online retailer of custom window coverings with over 40,000 five star reviews. Shop Blinds.com and save 45% off selected products.

45% off selected products at Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Want to talk more about what we saw at this Women's Final Four in Dallas. So for that, we bring in AP National Women's College basketball writer, Doug Feinberg. And Doug, I know you have a lot in your brain still processing. Of course, you got to catch an early flight too.

So I appreciate that you're spending a few minutes with us. How unlikely and improbable is this two year rise of LSU women's basketball from a losing program with not a lot of prospects to hiring Kim Mulkey away from a national power in Baylor and then winning this title two seasons later? Well, Amy, I'll tell you, I think if you asked me this question five years ago, I'd say there's no chance this could happen for a team. But the way the transfer portal works now and the way that Kim was so able to use it, getting Angel Reese and Katari Poole, you can build a team very, very quickly now on women's college basketball and men's college basketball. So it's unlikely in the sense of you need to everyone gel and play together well and all that sort of thing. But to get the players now, you don't have to wait and recruit the right ones.

You can just sort of through free agency pick up the ones that you think are going to work for you. And sure enough, it's worked out great for LSU and Kim this year. What is it about Kim that just makes her a winner? Because everywhere she's gone, everything she's done, she wins. She's a great coach. I mean, she's 4-0 now in championship games. I think she's third all-time behind Geno and Pat for overall championships of four. She just, she's a great accidental coach. She gets the most out of her players because I think she's loyal to them.

I mean, there's people either love Kim or hate Kim, it seems. But seeing her players on the podium tonight, they would run through a brick wall for her. Alexis Morse was with her at Baylor five years ago, got dismissed from the team. And you would think, okay, I'm never going to play for that coach ever again. But when she was looking for a spot to land, Kim said, come back to me.

I want you to play for me. And they seem to be very well together. And obviously, she had an unbelievable tournament, had a great game tonight.

That's the thing. You think of a player that she threw off the team for some issues, would never want to play for her again, yet comes back, plays for her at LSU, and has an unbelievable tournament run. Definitely does inspire loyalty. You can see that with those players who have played for her, and I would say most of the great coaches do that. From her antics on the sidelines, and I've heard her, I mean, she's actually said to me before that she kind of loses her mind there on the sidelines, to the way that she has such high standards for her players because she has such incredible belief in them.

You can see the spirit just completely changes. What does it mean to have her as a Louisiana native do this for LSU? I asked her today, actually, in the postgame press conference, what does it mean to do this, to go to your home state and win a championship, the first one ever for LSU, men's or women's basketball? And she's like, you know, I teared up about 90 seconds left on the clock.

I never do this. I started getting emotional. I don't know if I was thinking about coming home and doing this or just that it's the title. I know the game wasn't over at that point. Something about it made me get emotional. She started weeping on the sideline if people were watching the game on TV. It meant that much to her to be able to win a championship in her home state and to get the first one for LSU with all the great players that have gone through there, Simona Gusus, Sylvia Fowles, it meant so much to her. And it's a great story. I mean, coach goes home, wins title. That's a really, really good thing. If I would have won, you'd have hometown player and Kaitlin Clark wins title for coach who was an Iowan.

So like you have either way, it would be a great storyline for someone coming home or staying home and winning a championship. We're excited to spend a few minutes with Doug Feinberg, who covers women's basketball on the national stage for the Associated Press. With us from Dallas, where the women's Final Four just wrapped up and LSU winning its first title.

It's after hours with Amy Lawrence on CBS Sports Radio. Let's talk about the game itself. There were a lot of fouls called. What did you see, Doug, yourself and what did you hear about the number of fouls that were called in this game? I mean, Amy, I think when I go to sleep soon, I'm going to sort of have whistles in my head from the amount that were called tonight.

Here's my issue. It seems social media has pluses and minuses, and I'm sure people can weigh their thoughts on it. But there are more people talking about the officiating in this game than they were talking about the game. And that's never good for any game, let alone a championship game. Were things called fouls probably that they weren't used to? It seems that way. It was both sides.

That's a very important thing to say. It wasn't like they were favoring one team or the other. I mean, Andrew Reeves getting two fouls in the first quarter was not good. If you were on the court, he's one of the most electrifying players in women's college basketball right now.

You don't want to be on the bench. And then obviously on the other side, Kaitlin Clark taking out fouls. And the technical foul she got from my co-workers, the pool reporter, asked the official why she got a technical foul in that game. And the rule, and again, I don't know the exact rule, but basically the team got a delay of game warning earlier in the game, early in that quarter, and then Clark threw the ball or swatted the ball away, which is another delay of game. She got the technical foul for that. If that's the rule, that's the rule. I don't know if that's a smart rule to have, but that's what the rule is. You would think they would be like, hey, you know, don't do that again. Or something to sort of like know the situation that it's your fourth foul because you get a personal foul on you if you get a technical foul.

It just didn't sit well with a lot of people. And I just think there needs to be a little better accountability for things when officials are done. Listen, the first time ever they had 11 female officials officiating in the Final Four, which is a great thing.

They said for Title IX, the 15th anniversary. So I understand that. But you've got to wonder about a lot of things when you can't really question officials on calls. You can question coaches on calls. Why did you make that call? What was going on there? You can't question officiating. And I think that's a little bit of an issue that the NCAA needs to look at going forward. Doug, how would you describe the tournament that Kaitlyn Clark had?

It's the best one I've ever seen. I mean, I've been covering this sport now for 16 years. And the only one I can think is comparable is before I started covering it, I was in college packed in, was Cheryl Swoop's run when she helped Texas Tech win the championship in 1993. She had 47 points in the title game. And she had an unbelievable run. And actually Kaitlyn broke her record for points in the tournament.

I think Swoop's had 177 and Clark had 191 when you add them all up. But a triple-double, the first ever 40-point triple-double to get them to their first Final Four in 30 years. And then throw in, oh, the next game I'll have 41 points again to beat the unbeaten team in South Carolina that was trying to chase its own history of a 10th team to go undefeated through the tournament and back-to-back title. So the bigger the stage got, the better Kaitlyn played.

And that to me is unbelievable. For people who don't know the recent history of South Carolina, of course, the defending champions, they had a 42-game win streak into that national semifinal. And Clark had the 41 points.

This is Dawn Staley's championship roster, right? And there was so much promise for them to go back-to-back. How would you rate the shock value, Doug, on a scale of 1 to 10?

I think it was shocking. I'd put it probably like a 5 or 6 because, as you mentioned, they had won 42 straight. They're the best team in the country. They had run through everyone as far as going undefeated. But to me, they also had, I think, a bunch of games where they were trailing and had to come back and win it.

I remember some of the great teams in the past would run through everybody, the UConn Dynasty, the 2013-16. Their games, they never trailed. I think they had double-digit victories in every one. South Carolina beat Mississippi in overtime earlier this year. They beat Stanford in overtime. So they were undefeated, but they weren't maybe as dominant as those teams. But to go undefeated is to go undefeated.

And that's what Dawn Staley had done. And she was a phenomenal coach. And they were a great team that just ran into a really hot player and playing on the court in Kaitlyn Clark. And a team that played great and played a strategy.

They dared them to beat them from the outside. And South Carolina just couldn't do it the other night. Doug Feinberg is with us from Dallas having covered the Women's Final Four, the women's tournament for the Associated Press.

It's after hours here on CBS Sports Radio. To clarify, Kaitlyn Clark is returning to Iowa, correct? She is. She is another year that she has to come back for because the WNBA, you have to have certain rules.

You have to be 22 the year you'll be drafted. She's only a junior with all the COVID rules and stuff. She could actually come back for two more years if she wanted to. I think she has one more year in her definitely. And we'll see what happens, how their season plays out next year.

What about Angel Reese? Unique player, you mentioned that. Obviously has a flair and has a streak when it comes to double-doubles. So she stepped on the court and the work that she does gets you double-digit points and rebounds. What about her prospects moving forward? She is fun to watch, Amy.

She set the NCAA record tonight with her 34th consecutive double-double to break Courtney Parrish's mark for a single season. She is fun. She's exciting. She brings a flair to the game, as you said. And she's actually funny.

She's not apologetic for it. She is who she is and it should be celebrated. She shows her emotion on the court.

She's got the lashes. She just loves to sort of show off who she is on the court. She should be able to do that. She shouldn't be chastised for it. She shouldn't be given crap for it, so to speak.

And it's great. She is one of the most exciting players and one of the best players in college basketball right now. It's just, again, remindful of that relationship that Kim has with her players. And I heard her say on the court after the game on Sunday, she gets that some people may look at her players and say, you know, they've got big personalities, you know, they're this, they're that, and yet she just lets them be who they are.

And that's always been a hallmark of her teams. What's funny about Angel is that I asked her yesterday about transferring to LSU, and LSU wasn't even one of the schools she was going to transfer to. She was going to go originally to Tennessee and South Carolina were the two that she really wanted to go to. And then I forget who she said, but someone said, hey, at least you should look at LSU. She went there, had a visit and canceled the other ones because I love playing here. I want to play here.

I'm coming here. How was the atmosphere in Dallas for the women's final four as it continues to grow? It was fantastic. I mean, listen, they set a tennis record for the entire tournament. Nice that ratings records, I believe, for the semifinals and the early rounds were through the roof.

I can only imagine what the ratings can be for this game when it comes out tomorrow or the next day. I mean, it was electric. I mean, there was 19,000 fans both nights was great. There was people cheering for everybody. I mean, it wasn't like one sided cheering, although there was probably more pro Iowa crowd than anti Iowa crowd or pro LSU crowd, I should say. It was fun.

I mean, they've done a really good job last couple of years selling out the women's final four selling up championship games. And it feels like a great atmosphere. It feels like what you want for a game of this magnitude. So now deep breath.

And just to get back to the transfer portal before I let you go. How much pressure does this put on coaches, coaches that would like to try to build a program? And yet it almost feels like players can get picked off so easily.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I think Jeff Wall said it's selection Sunday and transfer portal Monday. Wow. And that's kind of what it feels like. I mean, there's so many players in the portal, so many people are changing teams, really a free agency market, basically, without having salary caps in a sense. Players can go wherever they want. Their players enter the portal. And there's only so many jobs. So the question is if a thousand players enter the portal, not a thousand players are going to get offers.

And what happens to the ones that don't? So that's a fear to me going forward. I've heard coaches say to me that they've heard other coaches sort of tampering, so to speak.

They'll tell a player, hey, enter the portal because they'll take you. And that should not be how it works. But it's been out there. There have been coaches that have been using it very well. I mean, I said Kim Mokey did a great job getting the ones that fit her team this year and last year. Coach Yo at Mississippi has done a phenomenal job this year. It sort of made a name for herself in the tournament.

She says she's big into the portal. She already took a kid from North Carolina who's really good to transfer to her. So it's here to stay. And to be honest, I think that's going to be going for a while of having kids transfer because they get the free year now where if you transfer during a certain window, which I think is around now for the next 30 days, wherever it is, you can get a free year and not have to sit out, which you used to have to do when you transfer. So I think that's going to be a big way for people, especially after the same success the teams had, to build teams quickly if you're a new coach or an established coach.

Doug Feinberg at Doug F-E-I-N-B-E-R-G, the AP National Women's Basketball Writer, one-time partner with me on Columbia Women's Basketball. It's great to catch up with you. Thank you for the insight and the intel from Dallas. Thanks, Amy. Always a pleasure. We'll be right back after you get your podcasts.