For Vanderbilt’s women’s team, it only seemed like the year’s most stinging setback came in the 68-63 loss to Tennessee that prevented them from reaching the Final Four. As it turned out, the biggest loss arrived nearly two weeks after the season ended, when Coach Jim Foster left for a new job at Ohio State.

Except for a national championship, it appeared that Foster had just about everything at Vanderbilt a coach could want—and just about none of the negatives that might induce a coach to entertain other offers. His program was a perennial powerhouse. He was well compensated.

He was appreciated by the administration, which seemed to emphasize women’s basketball roughly as much as the men’s game. (Not many NCAA powers can say that.) He had a loyal fan following that was large by the standards of women’s hoops. He had first-rate, newly improved facilities. He even had a team returning with the talent to go as far, if not farther, than this year’s squad.

So Vanderbilt folks understandably spent a good part of last weekend scratching their heads trying to figure out why Foster traded his baseline seat in Memorial Gym to lead a program that had sunk to mediocrity, at a school where women’s basketball probably will never be more than a moon distantly orbiting around the football stadium.

To judge from Foster’s remarks at his introductory press conference in Columbus, the answer will have to be disconcerting to Vandy fans.

He told Buckeye Boosters that Ohio State offered him something he had never enjoyed previously: an opportunity to coach at a major public university, in a talent-rich state where girls grow up with dreams of playing for the big state school. That’s the one thing Vanderbilt could not match, and it reveals something about the evolution of women’s college basketball.

Although Foster had always recruited well for Vanderbilt within Middle Tennessee—another talent-rich environment—the Commodores do not enjoy a recruiting base in which they are naturally dominant, such as Ohio State enjoys in Ohio. There was a time, perhaps, when that did not matter so much, because a private school such as Stanford or Duke or Vandy could recruit nationally based on the strength of its academic reputation. The dynamic was wholly different from men’s basketball. Without significant TV exposure, or an opportunity to jump to a professional league after only one or two years in college, women had real incentive to play for a school that could give them a valuable degree as well as a degree of on-the-court success.

None of that has changed just yet, but women’s basketball may be heading that way.

The history of big-time college sports follows a consistent long-term pattern. Before there even was a Female Final Four, smaller schools with smarts—like Delta State, Stephen F. Austin, Wayland Baptist and Immaculata—could be national powers in women’s basketball, just as Sewanee and Yale were early forces in college football and City College of New York became a giant in men’s hoops.

As these sports matured, and more schools became serious about developing strong programs, those that could not make significant financial commitments fell away. Then they reached a plateau where large state universities began to dominate, though private schools with well-established programs could compete with them. Hardly anyone remembers it now, but in the 1930s, SMU, Columbia and Duke played in the Rose Bowl, and TCU produced a Heisman winner. None of them register as much more than a blip on the football radar screens today.

That’s about the stage in its development that women’s basketball seems to have reached. In terms of prominence, the Immaculatas and Wayland Baptists have gone the way of the iguanodon. The private schools that established themselves early on as national powers, like Vanderbilt and Stanford and Old Dominion, are still powerful.

And it is still possible for those who entered the game relatively late, like Notre Dame and Duke, to become powerhouses, too. Women’s basketball is young and malleable—not calcified like college football, where it’s almost impossible for an upstart or a longtime loser to change its station without cheating.

Increasingly, though, the large state universities with deeper pockets, bigger athletic departments and more boosters are occupying the Top 25, just as they came to do with football. That’s largely the way of men’s basketball, too; though little Gonzaga can crack the Top 10, the school draws attention because of the novelty of its ascent to the heights normally held by Kansas, Kentucky and North Carolina.

Don’t fret for Vanderbilt just yet, if that’s your inclination. Certainly, Foster will be difficult to replace, both as a teacher of the game and a coach who cares about the development of his students off the court. But the Commodores hold a handful of strong cards that give them all the advantages in attracting a new coach that they lacked for luring a big name in football.

More of a cause for concern is the long-term direction of women’s basketball, because it says something that one of the country’s winningest coaches at one of the country’s strongest programs concludes that the grass ultimately will be greener at a big state university.

To some of us, women’s basketball has been a last, best hope for college athletics. I love college football and men’s basketball, but I do so in spite of the knowledge that both sports are so thoroughly corrupted that Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich look like paragons of integrity by comparison.

Unlike their male counterparts, women’s hoopsters are not enrollee-athletes. They are not employee-athletes. They are not apprenticing so that they can take their skills to the pros after just a year or two on campus.

The women stay for four years. They get their degrees. They’re real students. Four of the senior starters on Connecticut’s 39-0 national championship team are on the school’s academic honor roll.

And when you watch the women play, you see more teamwork and less individuality. At least some of that must result from the comparative lack of attention to women’s basketball. College recruiters aren’t scouting junior-high girls, at least not yet. Parents of girls don’t yet hold them back a year in school so they’ll be taller and stronger for sports.

The media don’t devote lots of ink and airtime to anointing high school girls’ players as the next Chamique Holdsclaw (“the next Michael Jordan,” a high schooler from Cleveland, already has been featured in Sports Illustrated). For once, perhaps sexism has operated in women’s favor. They may still be objectified in the swimsuit issue, but their identities aren’t yet entirely wrapped around their basketball skills.

Yet there are signs that it’s all slowly changing. As crowds at college women’s games get bigger, the money and competitive pressures are getting bigger, too. Recruiting has become fiercer. There are more basketball camps and AAU teams for the girls, just like those that have given so many boys an undeserved sense of entitlement. In this case, I’m not sure equality is such a good thing.

This year, for the first time, there’s a women’s team of McDonald’s high-school All-Americans. And this year, for the first time, I saw something on the court I had observed only among boys: an eighth-grade girl, an AAU veteran, with an insufferably hot-dog attitude not even commensurate with her skills.

The track record for last, best hopes is not promising. Before 1919, advocates of universal suffrage claimed that, once women had the vote, they would become a powerful moral force. They would oust the corrupt old boys. They would expel the purveyors of graft and transform the country.

An analysis of voting patterns in the years following the suffragettes’ triumph revealed something unexpected. At the polls, the women behaved no differently from the men.