A controversy arose this week that is simultaneously a little-bitty nothing and a hornet’s nest of grand magnitude — because a little bit of truth and reality needs to be shouted from as high a rooftop as possible.

And the subject is … women’s basketball.

Not one of my preferred subjects. But as my alma mater, Louisiana State University, is the defending national champion in the sport — and as the LSU Tigers on Monday night played Iowa in front of a women’s record audience of 12 million people — the controversy that emerged from that game is actually somewhat relevant to our national discussion.

Iowa won the game, by the way, which is something that Kate Kruse, the producer of The Spectacle podcast and an Iowa native, was very keen to reinforce to me on Tuesday when we recorded this week’s episodes. Iowa is a great team, and Caitlin Clark, the team’s star player who poured in 41 points to beat LSU, is to women’s basketball what Pete Maravich was to the men’s game. Clark has a little more about her than Maravich had, which is why it’s easy to see Iowa winning the national championship next week.

But the game isn’t the controversy. The controversy is over the fact that LSU’s team wasn’t present on the court for the playing of the National Anthem:

LSU Women’s Basketball Team skipped the National Anthem

Iowa stood proud

LSU just got their ass beat

With the entire stadium cheering against them

Season over

Let this be a lesson to all players: the cringy, selfish woke athlete moment is OVER

????????pic.twitter.com/ctskb0GXIC

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 2, 2024

I’m a Benny Johnson fan, and I’m cognizant of the fact that his being from Iowa makes this an emotionally charged issue for him.

And Benny Johnson is anything but alone in sounding off with this kind of rhetoric about the pre-game occurrences at Monday night’s contest.

But he’s wrong. He’s way off. And he ought to apologize.

Here’s the truth about this stupid controversy, in a few easily digestible little factoids:

First, LSU did not conduct a protest of the National Anthem on Monday night. The team just wasn’t on the court for it. Iowa was, which created some clunky optics for LSU’s program, but this had more to do with routines and logistics than a lack of patriotism.

Second, LSU Coach Kim Mulkey, who is one of the best coaches — if not the best — in the women’s game (the job she’s done in three years rebuilding LSU’s program — including a Sweet Sixteen appearance, a national title, and an Elite Eight appearance — after building a dominant program at Baylor speaks to this), is anything but a woke leftist who fosters poor patriotism among her players.

Believe me. If you’re a conservative, Mulkey is about as friendly to you as you’re going to get. There’s a reason woke journos at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have trashed her in the past week, and it’s not because she aligns too closely with them culturally and politically.

Third, the presence of the teams on the court for the playing of the National Anthem at basketball games is a very on-and-off thing, and it’s often the product of decisions by the event managers. For example, at last year’s national championship women’s hoops contest featuring these same two teams, a game LSU won over Iowa, neither team was on the floor for the National Anthem. And if my information is correct, neither team was on the floor for the National Anthem during Monday night’s second game between Connecticut and Southern California.

Fourth, LSU’s pre-game routine calls for a trip back to the locker room 12 minutes before tipoff.

So what we have here is a massively overblown, stupid controversy that is fueled by a great deal of ignorance — not to mention the more than a little bit of market positioning that the mainstream media has performed on LSU’s team. It’s been presented as the Bad Girl of women’s college basketball largely because LSU’s star player, Angel Reese, talks a lot, and a few of the team’s other stars have a similar swagger.

That and the media covering women’s basketball have hated Mulkey ever since she offered tepid, at best, support for the rather imperfectly patriotic Brittney Griner, her former star player at Baylor who trashed the country on her way to moonlighting as a pro player in Russia, only to find herself in one of the country’s prisons.

All of this is utterly idiotic. Basketball games aren’t all-day affairs as football games are, and event management for basketball is a lot more compressed. It isn’t all that standard for a team to be on the floor for the National Anthem in men’s or women’s basketball; the Anthem is for the fans.

Still, the reality now is that Mulkey is going to have to change her pre-game routine because of the toxic optics and blown-up controversy this has created. And while nobody seems to get this, Louisiana’s new governor, Jeff Landry, just did her a big favor by weighing in on this:

My mother coached women’s high school basketball during the height of desegregation, no one has a greater respect for the sport and for Coach Mulkey. However, above respect for that game is a deeper respect for those that serve to protect us and unite us under one flag !

It is…

— Jeff Landry (@JeffLandry) April 2, 2024

Landry could have sat this one out, but what he’s done is pretty smart and an interesting little lesson in red-state governance.

Whether or not he understood the logistical nature of LSU’s absence on the court, he’s taken this thing out of Mulkey’s hands. She’s got to have her team on the court for the National Anthem from now on, simply because if not they’ll turn her into an anti-American villain. But with Landry stepping in to mandate not just her team’s presence for the National Anthem but that of all the teams at all of Louisiana’s public colleges, it’s out of her hands, and she’s now removed from the controversy.

Then he went further and applied this to the individual players. No kneeling, period.

That’s the part that really matters here, though it doesn’t apply to Mulkey’s players, none of whom have kneeled or even expressed a desire to kneel (at least, not to my knowledge). But it ends any further potential for this issue to poison college sports in the Bayou State because nobody on any team — whether at LSU, Louisiana Tech, the University of New Orleans, McNeese State, Grambling State University, or any of the others — really wants to put his or her scholarship in jeopardy over kneeling during the National Anthem.

It’s a bit of opportunism, but it’s also a way to fix a problem that has been irritating people for going on a decade now. And he’s doing it while protecting the coaches of those teams, who, regardless of their own political affiliations, might have to recruit players from heavily Democrat families: “Well, it’s state policy that we stand for the National Anthem, so we all do it and that’s that.”

Either way, we need to put this dumb controversy to bed before the friendly fire gets out of control.

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