Why the women captured basketball's airwaves

And other loose ends at season's end, as the portal doors keep swinging.

Before they rack up the basketballs….

Even two years ago, no one would have believed the women’s Final Four would draw an average of four million more viewers than the men’s event. Not unless Leslie Nielsen was running the ratings.

But Iowa-South Carolina not only put Connecticut-Purdue in the dust, it surpassed all basketball games since 2019 and all sporting events since Game 7 of the Washington-Houston World Series of 2019. An average of 18.8 million watched the Gamecocks hold off the Caitlin Clark Five and finish an undefeated season. Five years ago, the Baylor-Notre Dame women’s final drew 3.7 million.

It must be pointed out that the women’s game was on ABC and the men’s Final Four was on TBS on the Turner Sports Networks, not CBS. For reference, the 2017 men’s final between North Carolina and Gonzaga drew seven more million viewers on CBS than the 2018 final between Villanova and Michigan on Turner. That makes a difference, as well as the archaic 9:20 EDT tipoff time Monday night.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Something’s happening here, and it’s very clear. The women’s game has been gaining ground rapidly before our very eyes, and beneath the gaze of the diminished media.

Perhaps you’ve noticed teenagers who can tick off the starting grid for Manchester City and have no idea who plays for the New York Yankees. Our sporting tastes are fluid. Baseball, boxing and horse racing dominated the scene in the 50s and 60s. Track and field was a major preoccupation even in non-Olympic years, if you remember Sports Illustrated covers that featured Jim Ryun and Bob Seagren. Although baseball still has deep roots and has started to rally with its recent rules changes, those sports have plummeted. Soccer, mixed martial arts and women’s basketball and volleyball, along with e-sports, have risen.

So much of it depends on star power. Muhammad Ali doesn’t live here anymore. Terence Crawford does, but you have to pay $69.95 to watch him, which is why some of you are Googling to find out who he is. And there are still great horses, but they disappear into the breeding barn as fast as they ran a mile and a quarter. Secretariat was the People’s Horse, running six times in 1973 after he set records in all three Triple Crown races. When he came to Chicago’s Arlington Park, mayor Richard Daley proclaimed it “Secretariat Day,” and 41,000 fans showed up. Unfortunately, there was no “Flightline Day,” when perhaps the greatest horse since Secretariat streaked through 2022 like an eclipse. Flightline wasn’t forgotten. He wasn’t known well enough for be.

Clark didn’t rely on existing fans. She created tens of thousands of new ones. She was a paradigm-breaker. It isn’t hard to understand why Sheryl Swoopes, a Hall of Famer from the WNBA’s infancy, might be a bit resentful of all this, or why Diana Taurasi predicted Clark will need a few games, or maybe a season, to find her professional legs. But at least people want to see Clark’s saga unfold. The Indiana Fever will draft Clark to play with 2023 Rookie of the Year Aliyah Boston and consequently will have 36 of its 40 games televised nationally in 2024.

Meanwhile, South Carolina will try to extend its winning streak, Connecticut will welcome top recruit Sarah Strong to play with Paige Bueckers, and Kim Mulkey and LSU will be around to kick up dust. Breakthrough freshmen like MiLaysia Fulwiley of South Carolina and Hannah Hidalgo of Notre Dame will have a bigger stage; Juju Watkins of USC will be the most watchable player on the West Coast, regardless of gender. Could we see a day when the men’s final is the Sunday appetizer and the women’s final is the Monday entree? Probably not, but nobody envisioned a weekend like this.

Dalton Knecht

If you knew what Tristen Newton would bring to Connecticut basketball, you were either a palm reader or an East Carolina basketball season-ticket holder. Both are rare. Newton made second-team All-AAC at East Carolina, but trumpets did not sound when he announced he would transfer to UConn. Two national championships later, scouts might consider dropping by ECU, lest they get fooled again.

Newton was the Most Outstanding Player of this Final Four. He illustrates the main reason Dan Hurley is an outstanding coach: Talent recognition. Indeed, today’s game demands a general manager’s touch. It’s hard to find compatible transfers, especially when they’re immediately eligible, and immediately expected to play well. Fortunately, there’s a very deep pool.

Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht, the SEC’s best player, came from Northern Colorado. Alabama relied on visitors from Cal State Fullerton, Wofford, Ohio University and North Dakota State. North Carolina State’s D.J. Burns Jr. came from Winthrop. Even Oakland’s Jack Gohlke, who shot Kentucky out of the tournament in the first round, was a grad transfer from Hillsdale College, a Division III school. And Kentucky, for all of its one-year apprentices who go to the NBA, was led by Antonio Reeves, who prepped for this moment at Illinois State.

This all means that if you’re focusing on the so-called power conferences, as the networks force you to do, you’re missing some quality basketball.

John Calipari

This is already the off-season of the Short Goodbye. No one at USC moved a muscle to keep Andy Enfield from taking the SMU job. No one at Arkansas seemed particularly upset that Eric Musselman was moving on to USC. And no one at Kentucky was pulling on John Calipari’s leg to dissuade him from migrating to Arkansas, an astonishing transaction that apparently happened within a 72-hour period during the Final Four.

Calipari, 65, did not leap into Hog Heaven for the money. His decision came after some restless seasons in Lexington, exacerbated by first-round NCAA losses to Oakland and St. Peter’s, and no appearances in the Final 16 since 2019.

Pick your version. Calipari left because athletic director Mitch Barnhart wouldn’t build him a new practice facility, didn’t have an NIL program organized, and couldn’t forget that Calipari, during a snit, called Kentucky a “basketball school,” which also ruffled the feathers of football coach Mark Stoops.

Or Calipari was urged to leave after his progressive unhappiness had chased assistant coaches and support personnel to lateral jobs elsewhere.

Keep in mind that the Big Blue Nation demands that Kentucky to do what Connecticut has done the past two years, even though Kentucky has only won one NCAA title since 1998. That was in 2012, when Calipari found gold in freshman Anthony Davis. Kentucky lost the 2014 title game to Connecticut and was eliminated by Wisconsin in the 2015 semifinals, its last visit to the Final Four.

The BBN was treated to magnificent talent over the years, even though it had a limited run. Over the past nine years, fourteen Kentucky players were drafted in the first round. Seven were in this year’s All-Star Game. There are 28 in the NBA or the G League overall.

Increasingly, Calipari spread the belief that the one-and-done model had benefits that superseded NCAA success. He was doing great things for families, he said, as his short-timers copped big NBA deals. He wasn’t just there to win games. Kentucky fans didn’t really buy into these random acts of kindness. They don’t know the words to “We Are The World.” They don’t really care if they were graced by the presence of Karl-Anthony Towns and Devin Booker and De’Aaron Fox. They wanted trophies, and as the years went on and the rest of college basketball got older and tougher, the eternal parade of Wildcat teenagers didn’t have the staying power.

Kentucky was talking to Baylor’s Scott Drew, who has won a national championship, maintained a nationally-prominent program, and has a smoother, sunnier personality than Calipari. But Drew also knew the nature of the demons behind Door #1, and on Thursday he decided to stay in Waco. The fraternity knows exactly what Kentucky is like, and it seems that many of them are baffled that Calipari became persona non grata. Tennessee’s Rick Barnes said Kentucky would eventually hang a banner for Calipari in Rupp Arena. Maybe. At the moment they’d use it for target practice.

And a cautionary tale…

There were 102 Division I teams that shot more 3-pointers, as a percentage of overall shots, than Connecticut during the regular season. Even at that, UConn ranked ahead of the other top seeds. Houston was 196th, North Carolina was 212nd and Purdue 252nd. Of the 30 teams that tried the highest percentage of 3-pointers, only five made the 68-team field.

However, UConn ranked fourth in 2-point shooting percentage (59.1 percent). Of the top 30 teams in that category, fifteen made the NCAA tournament.