By Pat Harty

IOWA CITY, Iowa – Under normal circumstances, there wouldn’t have been a decision to make.

But there is nothing normal about Megan Gustafson or about the Iowa women’s basketball team hosting the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament as a No. 2 seed.

So that’s why I had to make a decision about whether to cover the Iowa men’s basketball team’s NCAA Tournament game against Cincinnati on Friday in Columbus, Ohio, or to cover Gustafson and her cohorts.

I ultimately chose to stay home and cover the women, mostly out of respect for Gustafson and for what she and her teammates and coaches have accomplished this season.

Choosing between the men and women would usually be a no-brainer because the men are typically the bigger story and draw more readers.

But this is a unique situation with the Iowa women’s team because it is playing so well, and of course, because of Gustafson.

The 6-foot-3 senior center has established herself as the greatest player in the history of the Iowa program and has already been named the National Player of the Year by ESPN.

I feel safe in saying that we’ll never see a player like Gustafson again.

She makes double-doubles look almost routine and her team wins at a high level.

The risk with covering the women is that I won’t be there in person should the Iowa men make a run in the NCAA Tournament.

The odds of that happening might seem slim with Iowa having lost five of its last six games, but the NCAA Tournament is where the unlikely and improbable are known to occur.

The Iowa men have enough talented scorers and shooters to where they could get hot and pull of an upset as a No. 10 seed.

Stranger things have certainly happened in the Big Dance.

That’s why this was such a hard decision to make. I was torn for two days, going back and forth wondering what my readers would prefer me to do.

Most of the feedback I received said to cover the women, so that helped make the decision.

But I also wondered if some of the feedback was an overreaction to the men’s team having recently struggled.

Fans are frustrated with this latest skid, and the women are a nice distraction.

The women have a storyline that we might never see again with a national player of the year candidate leading a top-10 team at home in the NCAA Tournament.

There women also could face Drake in the second round, and that would create more intrigue with former Iowa player Jennie Baranczyk now coaching the Bulldogs.