Women's Basketball is Having A Moment
There will be more moments.
It’s the weekend and I would like to talk about sports.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World likes to watch various forms of sportsball. Baseball, football, basketball — these are all sports that entertain me. But if I’m being honest, prior to last year, I had probably watched, combined, an hour of women’s basketball in my lifetime. It never occurred to me to sit down and consciously decide to watch either an NCAA or WNBA game.
And then, last year, pretty much by accident, I watched the University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark lead her team past an undefeated South Carolina in the Women’s NCAA Final Four to advance to the national championship against LSU:
Clark’s skill set — pinpoint passing and logo-three-pointers — is the perfect lure for a casual fan like myself. My wife, who is not even a casual fan of most sportsball, will stop what she is doing and watch basketball when there are sharpshooters on the court.1
Last year’s Iowa-SC game was entertaining. And the championship game last year was even better, with LSU defeating Iowa and lots of trash talk and follow-on commentary about the trash talk.2 Which is how, in the 21st century, sports can capture the attention of casual observers.
My point is that when Iowa met LSU in this year’s NCAA women’s Albany 2 Regional last Monday, I had already decided that I wanted to watch the game. And neither Clark nor Reese disappointed:
That game earned monster ratings: “ESPN says 12.3 million people watched the rematch of last year's NCAA women's tournament final, with a peak audience of 16.1 million viewers. ‘Most-watched college basketball game EVER on ESPN platforms,’ the network said.” By comparison, last year’s Iowa-LSU finals game attracted just a hair under 10 million.
This year’s rematch was big enough for it to be the topic of conversation on Boston sports radio, which I occasionally listen to while commuting to work.3 What was interesting was the simultaneous assertions on air that:
The games had attracted a lot of eyeballs and women’s basketball was having a moment, but;
That moment would be fleeting because Clark and Reese were graduating and that what brings out those eyeballs are the stars and the good/bad narratives.
The first point is undeniably true, and the second point is partially true. There is no denying that Clark and Reese are transcendent talents and their decision to go pro could cause the college women’s game to lose some luster.
But there are two other possibilities that sports talk radio seems to have ignored. The first is that the entrance of Clark, Reese et al into the WNBA causes more people to watch those games. A lot of people think of Caitlin Clark as the female Stephen Curry, but Clark is a more complete player at this stage than Curry was when he left college. If she maintains her jaw-dropping shooting and passing skills at the pro level, more folks will watch the WNBA than ever before.
The other possibility is that the casual fans drawn by Clark do not fade away so quickly. The more casual fans watch women’s basketball, the more they will remember and the more intrigued they will be the next go-around. I watched the Iowa-LSU game this year because of what happened last year. In watching this year’s games, one can see all the controversies — like how the Iowa UConn semifinal ended last night:
As The Ringer’s Seerat Sohi noted:
We watch in hopes that all our questions and maybes will harden, over the course of a game, into certainties, but even after the final buzzer sounds, sports has a maddening way of leaving us with a litany of “what-ifs.”
In the final five seconds of what was the most anticipated college basketball game since … well, chart-topping Iowa-LSU earlier this week….
But we never got to see the ending. Maybe Edwards’s shot would have dropped through the net. Maybe it would have caromed off the rim. As the years pass and we revisit this game, we’ll always wonder: What if the refs hadn’t whistled Edwards for a mind-melting moving screen in the closing seconds of a Final Four game? Was it a foul? Sure. But there’s a foul on nearly every play, and sometimes discretion is the better part of enforcement. The Huskies commanded the first half, lost the lead in the second, clawed their way back in the final minutes, and drew up a great play that could have given us an all-time finish, only for UConn to be robbed of the agency to determine its fate. It was like watching The Gladiator and having it glitch right as Russell Crowe tilts his knife toward Joaquin Phoenix.
When you think about it, isn’t arguing over maybes and controversial calls a hallmark of mainstream arrival?
That’s exactly right. Next year there will be additional elements to these storylines. UConn behind Paige Bueckers is poised to come back to dominance; can Iowa return even with Clark and a lot of her teammates graduating? If anything, the fact that the women are staying in college for longer makes them more likely to produce compelling year-to-year storylines.4
If South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso dominates on Sunday like she did against NC State on Friday, I don’t see how Clark finishes her amazing college run with a national championship. But I know I’m going to tune in. Because women’s college basketball has been damn entertaining this past week.
My single-favorite moment of my wife watching watching sports was during the 2022 NBA Finals when she observed, “the Celtics should be guarding Stephen Curry more closely.”
Also a lot of racism directed at Angel Reese. The generous interpretation would be that most of the people watching that championship game had zero contextual knowledge of Reese’s gesture and therefore leaped to the absolute worst conclusion possible.
Mostly what I do is listen for a minute or two to confirm that even though the Celtics are having a banner year, the talk show hosts will spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the Patriots. I know football is a more popular sport, but spending hours talking about an Apple+ documentary about the Patriots dynasty rather than, you know, recent games seems like lunacy to me.
Plus ESPN has a really great bunch of commentators that have added a lot more value to the entertainment.
Women's collegiate basketball is everything the men's game used to be. Big-name superstars who attract interest and ratings. Players staying with their teams for several seasons, leading not only to continuity but to enticing rematches of the same players. I've never been a fan of women's hoops until the past couple of seasons. Now I am.
The last second call against UConn was perhaps an unfortunate call, but it wasn't a bad call. Edwards clearly did a moving screen that most of the time would have been called with no controversy. The ref was perfectly correct to call it; letting it go might have been more controversial.
The problem was that UConn's Edwards put the ref in the position where the decision had to be made. If you don't want a controversial call, then don't foul!
I would have liked to have seen a shot taken in those last few seconds; that it wasn't is on the UConn player, not the ref.