McGraw the public figure — the record and the voice

1987 – 2020

The record: Eight hundred forty-eight wins at Notre Dame against 252 losses, 936–293 in a career, across thirty-three seasons — some secondary listings give the career mark as 936–292, and one retirement write-up printed 848–253 and 936–263; the university's own biography and record book carry 848–252 and 936–293, and those are the figures this section prints. She stands as one of five coaches in Division I, men's or women's, with more than 930 wins, nine Final Fours and multiple national championships, and one of six Division I coaches to win more than one NCAA title. Twenty of her Notre Dame players went to the WNBA.

The honors: She was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011, the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, and — while still coaching, the thirteenth woman coach so honored — the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in September 2017. The Wooden Legends of Coaching Award followed in 2017. She was the national coach of the year four times in the Associated Press balloting (2001, 2013, 2014, 2018), three times in the Naismith balloting, twice each from the USBWA and the WBCA, and conference coach of the year, in the university biography's accounting, seven times across five different leagues — a spread no other coach in this section's period matches, because no other coach in it won in the East Coast, North Star, Midwestern Collegiate, Big East and ACC.

The press conference: On April 4, 2019, at the Final Four in Tampa, a reporter asked McGraw about hiring women, and she answered for about two minutes, uninterrupted: "We don't have enough female role models. We don't have enough visible women leaders. We don't have enough women in power." She went on through the numbers — women in Congress, in legislatures, in boardrooms — and the Equal Rights Amendment, still unratified. Sports Illustrated's account of the moment records that the clip was viewed nearly seven million times on Twitter alone. She had said, and repeated around that weekend, that she would no longer hire men as assistant coaches; her staffs were all women, and she noted she had taken all-female staffs to five Final Fours. At the 2018 Final Four she had been the only woman head coach present.

The standing: The speech did not change her results — she coached one more season — but it fixed her public place: the most successful coach in her program's history, and the women's game's most quoted voice on who gets to coach it. Notre Dame's next hire made the point in the program's own way, and it is the next entry.

Sources:

1. University biography and record book — the 848–252 and 936–293 records; the five-coach and six-coach standings; the Hall of Fame inductions and dates; the national coach-of-the-year counts; the seven conference honors in five leagues; the twenty WNBA players.
2. Sports Illustrated, June 17, 2019 — the April 4, 2019 press conference, the quotations, the viewing figure, the all-female staffs and the hiring position.
3. Retirement coverage (Associated Press; Indianapolis Business Journal), April 2020 — the variant career figures noted in this entry, against the university's own.