When two Final Fours collide
Mystery men in Houston, glamour women in Dallas
It takes about four hours to drive from Houston to Dallas. Two-and-a-half if you drive like a Texan.
Those with a heavy foot and a thick wallet can see college basketball at its highest levels, beginning Friday night in Dallas with the Women’s Final Four semis, then Houston Saturday for the men’s, then Sunday in Dallas for the women’s finals, then Houston Monday for the men.
Rarely have the two events been closer together geographically, and never have they been so close in national awareness. Last week, the Iowa women won their Final Eight win over Louisville and drew nearly two and a half million viewers on ESPN. But Caitlin Clark, Iowa’s offensive maestro, is not the only reason for this awareness shift. The Ohio State-Connecticut game in the Sweet 16 drew 2,41 million, and Virginia Tech-Ohio State and South carolina-Maryland both topped 2 million.
The regional finals were up 43 percent in viewership from last year. The regional semis were up 73 percent. Women’s basketball outdistanced the NBA all weekend long. Overall, women’s hoops are up 42 percent this season, and the men’s game is down six percent.
Normally, TV ratings wouldn’t command so much space here. We’re generally too preoccupied with them, and unfortunately we often link the worthiness of the event to the eyeballs. But when you have a whole media peanut gallery chanting, “Woke, woke, woke” at everything the NBA does, you don’t hear much when women’s basketball shows so much ratings power. That’s why it’s significant — that, and the suspicion that the popularity of women’s sports has sneaked up on the media’s attention span.
Take the NWSL last weekend. The San Diego Wave drew 30,854 fans in new Snapdragon Stadium, on the site of the old Qualcom, where San Diego State’s football team plays. Angel City FC, the Los Angeles team, drew 22,000. That’s huge, and it’s not dependent on the Olympic and USWNT soccer stalwarts, not for the most part. Something is happening here, and it will become clear soon enough.
Meanwhile, some New Age musicians are taking the stage in Houston. Although Connecicut has won four NCAA championships since 1999, the other three are Final Four virgins. Miami will play UConn Saturday and Florida Atlantic and San Diego State will be in the other semifinal. That’s right. A team from either the Mountain West or Conferene USA will play for the championship on Monday.
No McDonald’s high school All-American will be performing. Only two first-year freshman, Connecticut’s Donovan Clingan and San Diego State’s Miles Byrd, are likely to play. There’s no guarantee that any of these players will appear in the 2023 NBA draft or will have significant NBA careers, although it’s hard to believe Clingan and Adama Sanogo from UConn and Jordan Miller from Miami won’t find a way. But the tinsel programs like Kentucky, Kansas and Duke didn’t make it out of the first weekend, and North Carolina and Villanova didn’t make the field at all. Those five are responsible for 19 of the NCAA championships since 1975, the year in which conferencer runnerups were permitted, John Wooden retired, and UCLA’s dynasty days screeched to a halt.
Fans say they love NCAA upsets. Fans also say they love upsets in the first round of the Grand Slam tennis tournaments. (Fans say they don’t love golf upsets.) But they didn’t like it when Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi weren’t around in the second week, and it’s questionable that they’ll love the effort of identifying with schools that many of them literally never heard of.
Florida Atlantic is legitimately good enough to win this thing, and their Conference USA rivals, North Texas and UAB, just finished playing in the NIT final (with North Texas winning). The Owls are a No. 9 seed, far more formidable than the George Masons and St. Peterses that flipped over the furniture in other tournaments. But they’re also the best story. Dusty May took the head coaching job after he was an assistant in Florida and hadn’t yet seen the Boca Raton campus. According to Matt Norlander’s story on CBSSports.com, May was so mortified by the bedraggled gym and locker room that he went home and burst into tears, saying he had committed “professional suicide.” Eventually he dried up and went recruiting, and his first target was Michael Forrest. Now Forrest is a senior, and in the Final Four.
Miami and San Diego State were never that destitute, and they had already shown they were highly conpetitive. But Miami wasn’t supposed to beat top-seeded Houston, and San Diego State wasn’t supposed to usher out Alabama, which had the nation’s best freshman in Brandon Miller.
The common theme is maturity. Because of the extra year granted in the wake of Covid-19, and because of the fluidity of the transfer process, these are veteran teams that look like they could survive an NFL training camp. The Aztecs have five players in their rotation who are playing either their fifth or sixth year of college basketball, and two others who are playing their fourth. UConn has a fifth-year senior, two “regular” seniors, and three juniors. Miami has four fourth-year players, and FAU has three juniors and three third-year sophomores.
Some of the transfers came from the landed gentry, like Kansas State, Minnesota, Texas Tech, Virginia Tech, Cal, and Texas A&M. San Diego State’s Jaedon Ledee came from Ohio State and TCU. FAU’s Jalen Gaffney even transferred from UConn. But others came from the teams who rarely grace our TVs, teams like Seattle, Oakland (Mich.), East Carolina, U. of San Diego, Arkansas State and, yes, George Mason. That’s where Miller came from to join Miami coach Jim Larranaga, who took Mason to the 2006 Final Four. The best mid-major players can play perfectly well in the so-called big time, just as the best Division II players can prosper in Division I. There simply isn’t that much difference.
The women’s game is changing, too. UConn and Tennessee and Notre Dame don’t live here anymore, and Stanford lost to Ole Miss, which came the closest of anyone to beating South Carolina. The Gamecocks are the defending champs and have a 42-game winning streak. That’s astounding work for coach Dawn Staley and crew, considering the strength of the SEC and the tough non-league schedule South Carolina plays.
Clark is one of the most electrfying players in recent basketball history, but Angel Reese at LSU isn’t far behind, and the Tigers have gotten to the Final Four in two years with coach Kim Mulkey, who won the title at Baylor, is known snarkily as Bayou Barbie, and will find who-knows-what in her closet to wear to the semifnal bench.
Women’s basketball will be back in our focus when the WNBA resumes and particularly if Brittney Griner manages to get back on the court for Phoenix, after her unspeakable ordeal in Russia. Generations of girls have aspired to play nationally televised college basketball and then play professionally, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. They don’t remember the pioneering days of Immaculata and Delta State, or the pre-Title IX times when women had to practice wherever they could, and the coaches sewed the letters on the uniforms. It’s a journey that has led to Friday night in Dallas, and a moment in which the games aren’t that separate, and getting closer to equal.