Women’s Hoops Have Officially Overtaken Men’s Hoops (in college)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a dominant UConn team steamrolls every other team it plays in a basketball tournament, repeating an equally dominant run from a year earlier, and millions of more people watch a similar tournament with players of a different gender and games between much more competitive teams instead. For much of the 2010s, this described the women’s tournament, which had Geno Auriemma’s winning title after title, going on insane undefeated runs, and blowing out even the best teams they encountered. This year, it describes the men’s tournament, which had UConn win every game by more than 13 points for the second straight year and play in the least watched men’s basketball final of all time for the second straight year.

The women’s final had more viewers than the men’s final for the first time ever, and it wasn’t close.

5 million more people watched Caitlin Clark and Iowa go up against Dawn Staley and South Carolina on Sunday than watched Purdue face the Big East’s newest headache on Monday. I understand that Villanova was doing the same thing to the Big East and to the rest of college basketball in the late 2010s, with a 2018 team that has a case for being one of the greatest men’s teams ever along with this year’s Huskies, but more people watched us do it, and we were taking down much bigger names, like Kansas, UNC, and this year’s football champion Michigan. The biggest names UConn beat in their last two runs were probably Gonzaga and Alabama. One is a mid-major that plays for a school of less than 8,000 and has never won a championship in basketball, and the other just happens to play for a school that had the biggest football dynasty of the last 15 years. Neither of them draw eyeballs like the teams we beat did.

Purdue was in a similar situation as Iowa on the women’s side going into the championship game: they were a Big Ten school going on their best tournament run ever due to having the tournament’s best player, in this case Zach Edey. Edey hasn’t transformed the men’s game nearly as much as Caitlin Clark transformed the women’s game, however. We’ve seen plenty of guys like Edey in the past. We have not seen many women like Clark before. The fact that Dawn Staley literally had to change the way her team played in response to what Clark’s Hawkeyes did to her last year shows this. She had coached South Carolina for 15 seasons before this one, and I doubt a single player spurred her to change her entire coaching philosophy for any of those seasons. We were seeing Clark vs a team built to defeat Clark, and it had the expected result, but that didn’t stop nearly 19 million people from tuning in anyway.

Narratives are what drive sports at every level, and women’s basketball simply had the more compelling narratives this year. Nobody outside of New England cares about UConn repeating as champs. Unless you’re a Purdue fan or an Indiana fan hate-watching Purdue, you aren’t going to care about Purdue. In women’s ball, you had a generational player taking her team to the championship game for the second year in a row, an underdog for the second year in a row (unlike the Huskies), with her legacy, her coach’s legacy, everything on the line. Regardless of what happened Sunday, there would be no question that Staley has had a bigger impact on the sport than anybody else, which I’ve already argued. Clark was the headline attraction for Sunday’s game, but it was Staley who helped pry women’s basketball from Auriemma’s grip and give schools like Iowa as well as their superstars an opportunity to shine on the biggest stage. Staley turned a school that was solidly a football school ten years ago into a school that regularly sells out arenas not just for basketball but for women’s basketball, and for that alone, her legacy cannot be disputed.

Clark is a more interesting case. The game has never had a draw like her before and might never have a draw like her again, and Iowa was much better than it had any right to be thanks to her. She couldn’t get the job done with back-to-back opportunities in the championship game, however, and championships do matter when we talk about legacy. She has her records, and she’s done many great things for the sport in her time with Iowa, helping it reach a bigger audience than I’m sure anybody involved with women’s basketball imagined even 2 or 3 years ago. She still has a chance to grow her legacy more and pick up some jewelry in the WNBA, and I’m sure she will, but winning a championship with Iowa would have made it clear that she’s the best the college game has ever had at least, and now that she’s heading to the pros ringless, you certainly can make an argument for other players being better. That’s what winning championships do for you, fair or not. That why Michael Jordan is still believed by most to be better than LeBron James despite James reaching four more Finals. Getting close isn’t good enough in the eyes of history. Charles Barkley and Allen Iverson both made the Finals, but since they retired without rings, they aren’t talked about among basketball’s greats, even though they will always be among Philly’s greats.

One thing that helps Jordan’s legacy along with his NBA championships is the championship he won in college with the Tar Heels, and James didn’t get an opportunity to play for a college championship because he didn’t go to college. Most of the big names in the NBA today don’t have college championships because they either came from the Euroleague or they were a one-and-done or a some-and-done, and a big reason Clark was able to reach the level she’s currently at is because she did all four years at Iowa. Any freshman in men’s ball that had her numbers as a freshman would have bolted to the NBA right after. The WNBA requiring that players do four years of college ball before going pro is what allows dynasties like UConn in the 2010s and South Carolina’s current dynasty to happen, but it’s also what allows the college game to generate the types of narratives that men’s basketball simply cannot. We’re seeing great players like Angel Reese, Paige Buekers, and JuJu Watkins create reputations for themselves alongside Clark, and while Clark and Reese are heading to the WNBA and Buekers will be joining them next year, Watkins is a freshman. Her Trojans will likely dominate the Big Ten for the next three years just like Clark’s Hawkeyes did this year, and she’ll be at the center of some of the sport’s new compelling narratives.

The future of women’s basketball has never been brighter than it is right now, and I don’t believe for one second that this will be the last time its championship game gets more viewers than the men’s one. I’ve had my doubts about whether the NCAA itself is committed to elevating the sport, as the women’s tournament continues to get sold to ESPN as a package deal with a ton of other tournaments, undervaluing it in the process, and it still gets a fraction of the attention that the men’s game gets on the first few weekends, but the players and the coaches have elevated the sport just by creating an amazing product, a better product than the men’s game has given us in a very long time.