As with any sporting event, there is definitely room for debate as to where this season's women's Final Four ranks among the best ever or how having a pair of two-seeds competing hurts or helps the game.

Those questions will certainly work themselves out over time, but for now we can say that at the very least that the Texas A&M Aggies' 76-70 win over the Notre Dame Fighting Irish for their first-ever women's basketball title crossed the threshold of being all that one might want from a competition to earn the top spot in one's sport.

The big plays and playmakers that made that game great certainly took center stage, but it was a game that was going to come down to the performances of each team as a whole to begin with. That was probably the defining feature of what made this game great, if difficult for the mainstream to latch onto, but also possibly the single biggest determinant in TAMU's win and something that played a factor in both teams' path to the championship game.

"Gosh, we were so good on offense and shot 60-something percent," TAMU assistant coach Vic Schaefer said after the game. "But you think about the way they opened the second half and then you look at the stat line, they shot 36 percent.

"The telling tale, when you watch Texas A&M in the future, look how many assists the other team has and you can tell if we're doing our job. They had 14 one-on-one baskets tonight. They had 10 assists for 10 baskets. So 14 - in other words, they had to create their own stuff. And when people are having to create against our kids, our kids are doing their job."

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No Maya Moore. No Tree. No big blocks from Brittney Griner. No problem. The disappointment some felt with the fact the undercards were fighting the headline bout were quickly erased when Texas A&M and Notre Dame put on their gloves and the Aggies survived for the 76-70 knockout.

"You're here because you want to cover women's basketball at the highest level," A&M coach Gary Blair said in his post game remarks. "Tonight, we gave you that game. We gave you that national championship game without the so-called powers of the world. The two powers tonight were the two that earned it, and that's Notre Dame and that's Texas A&M.

"Either one of us deserves this trophy, but we played just a little bit better in the second half. We shot 68-or-something percent in the second half, about what Notre Dame shot in the first half ... But we found a way. I really do not like to coach as hard as I had to tonight and use the whip a little. But they responded."

After starting out slow in the first half, senior all-American Danielle Adams turned the table in the second with 22 points. At the 13:57 mark in the second period, Adams sunk a pair of free throws to tie the game at 48-48 and start a 10 point scoring run of her own. When Adams stopped being the sole scorer for the Aggies with 10:06 to play, A&M had the 56-53 advantage which they never relinquished. She capped her collegiate career with a game-high 30 points and team-high nine rebounds en route to hoisting MVP hardware in Indianapolis.

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Join us here at Swish Appeal as we dish about the game, during the game!

Who: A tangle of number twos - the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish battle head to head with the Texas A&M University Aggies after knocking out the number ones

What: The final women's college basketball game of the 2010-2011 season to crown the champion!

When: 8:30 p.m. EST || Nationally televised on ESPN || Internet: ESPN3

How they got here -

How Texas A&M Took Down Stanford; Swish Appeal

Notre Dame Stuns Two Time Defending Champion UConn in National Semifinal, ESPN

Previews and predictions -

Notre Dame vs. Texas A&M: The Simulated Version; Swish Appeal

Notre Dame Poses Challenge to Aggie Defense; aggiesports.com

ND Women's Basketball: Title Time?; The Observer

Game notes - Texas A&M || Notre Dame

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During the Texas A&M Aggies' press conference yesterday morning, point guard Sydney Colson leaned over to her teammates to suggest that only one person on ESPN correctly picked the National Championship pairing between them and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

Even while watching her say that on the day before they were set to play for the title, the whole thing still seemed somewhat surreal - the consensus opinion this year was that the champion would be one of either Baylor, Connecticut or Stanford. Maybe some Lady Vols fans would have insisted that they be considered as well. But nobody really thought there was a possibility of none of the above making it, even if the presence of two-seeds in the National Championship is hard to consider an "upset".

Nonetheless, this is historic: just having a National Championship without #1 seeds is something that's only happened once prior in women's basketball in addition to TAMU making their first title game attendance.

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That the Texas A&M Aggies beat the Stanford Cardinal on Sunday night is not nearly as surprising as how they did so.

Multiple people on Twitter had essentially considered the game over once TAMU got down by 10 and seemed to be wearing down against Stanford's post play, press break, and what might have been the game of Mel Murphy's life. Forget playing the Rodney Dangerfield card - there was actually a point late in the game when it began to seem perfectly reasonable to give up on TAMU.

In fact, even if someone laid out Four Factors stats and didn't show you the score, you would have been justified in assuming that Stanford had won this game: in something of an anomaly, the Texas A&M Aggies lost three of the Four Factors on Sunday night (shooting efficiency, offensive rebounding percentage, and free throw rate) which led them to a significantly lower MEV, synergy, and team factors rating than Stanford. In other words, they played a much less efficient game than Stanford and still won. 

Perhaps that's a roundabout way of saying that a) defense is hard to measure and b) a wave of intense TAMU defense can trigger a game-winning run that ends National Championship hopes even for a team like Stanford. 

That's all just a statistical way of illustrating how heavily TAMU depended on turnovers to pull advance to their first-ever National Championship game.

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So many people were hoping and expecting Tennessee to make it to the Final Four with a potential matchup with Connecticut.  Just imagine the storylines, Meighan Simmons vs. Bria Hartley, the strained relationship between Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. But there was one roadblock, Notre Dame - and after Notre Dame’s rather easy win, 73-59 over the # 1 seed, there were some surprising factors that influenced the easy victory for the Irish.

"I think we weren't the aggressors tonight," said Tennessee guard Angie Bjorklund. "I give Notre Dame a lot of credit. They knew our game to a tee, our personnel and plays and just executed better than us."

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Notre Dame and Connecticut square off tonight with the biggest stakes up for grabs. It’s the fourth time this season  that the 2 will square off.  It’s kind of poetic for Notre Dame to be playing in its home state for the chance to play for a championship. It’s been 10 years since there last trip to the Final Four. The last time?  All they did is win a National Championship.

Nostalgia is a great thing but it won’t grab a point or a rebound for the Fighting Irish when they face the Connecticut Huskies today in Indianapolis in the second semifinal. They are going to need a little Ruth Riley and Niele Ivey magic from 2001. They will have one though as Ivey is an assistant coach for the Irish.

UConn and Notre Dame have squared off three previous times this season. The Huskies have won all three contests but not one of those games were the typical Connecticut cakewalk.

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The most consistent statistical key to success for the Texas A&M Aggies has been their turnover differential: they force opponents into a high rate of turnovers while keeping their own below average.

And as they showed against the Baylor Lady Bears in the Elite Eight, sometimes it's not even the actual turnovers but simply the presence of their on-ball pressure and well-coordinated defensive schemes that disrupts what opponents want to do.

Just ask Baylor's Odyssey Sims or pretty much anyone on the Georgia Bulldogs roster: the Aggies defense can intimidate opponents into forgetting what it's like to even have a clean look at the basket.

So what might be the key to beating TAMU for a Stanford Cardinal team that is typically perceived as methodical and precise in their offensive execution?

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