Iowa/LSU - 94-87
UConn/USC - 80-73
Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, JuJu Watkins
A brief pause from Wizards and Warriors cause March Madness is in full effect and this year, March Madness is all about the women’s game. It’s rare when an event lives up to the hype. In either direction, right? Things are rarely as bad as I anticipate and things I’ve long waited for are often a little less than.
Monday night really was it - THE night for women’s college basketball. Not one singular game or one singular player, but many, on all four teams. And this doesn’t even account for the number one team in the country, South Carolina, loaded with stars.
It lived up to the hype because we did it together. I mean, maybe you and I did – were you watching? But the collective We were watching. My entire twitter feed, generally filled with NBA, filled instead with Caitlin and Angel and Paige and JuJu and finding different ways to say wow and thank you. The next day the ratings came out and 12.3 million viewers were there for Iowa/LSU - the highest rated women’s basketball game ever. And one of the most watched sporting events of the year outside of one game of the NBA finals and a few NFL games. That game doubled the viewership of the previously most watched men or women’s basketball game on ESPN.
It was not that long ago that I had to find deserted sports bars who would be amenable to turning on the women’s game in order to watch midday UConn tournament games.
The narrative is finally changing although the basketball has been excellent for years. Here’s UConn’s coach, Geno Auriemma, talking about the difference and how players are no longer considered a rare unicorn.
I’m hoping the games on Friday also live up to the hype and rooting for a UConn/South Carolina final. But after these games finish next week, there are tons of teams ready for next year and plenty of stars - this burst of excitement is not solely because of Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark.
Unlike men’s college players, women can’t leave for the WNBA until they are either 22 or have graduated (or are about to graduate) from a four year college so as viewers we have many more years to get to know players and teams. International players can leave at 20 and they also are much more limited in the type of NIL income they can get because of student visa restrictions. The college women’s game is likely to be better from a fan perspective than the men’s game because fans like players, we like stories, we like to get to know people.
And since there are so many more people watching and media attention, there are a lot of opinions about what these women should say and do and wear and all too often that runs into ugly intersections of racism and sexism or comments that simply should be left in the group chat.
First, the general foolishness that would not happen in the men’s tournament:
ESPN is the network broadcasting the entire women’s tournament. On the score ticker on their website, the men’s games are listed front and center. To see the women’s scores EVEN FOR GAMES THAT ARE LIVE AND ON THEIR NETWORK, you have to go elsewhere on their website.
At the tournament venue in Portland, the three point line was wrong on one side of the court for three of the four games played there. Here was their fix for the UConn/USC game.
In the first weekend of the tournament, Utah was playing in Spokane, WA, but staying in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, 35 miles away, because there was a lack of lodging. You would assume that there would be nearby lodging for the TEAMS. While there, they experienced racist slurs arriving and leaving a restaurant.
LSU star Angel Reese posted that she had broken up with her boyfriend and then after a sub-par performance, writers speculated that her break-up was impacting her basketball game. Have you ever heard that said about a college men’s player? And also, did it not occur to anyone that breakups are often really good things and she might feel relieved?
And then there’s the more pointed racist and sexist commentary, particularly about LSU and South Carolina players. This isn’t new - last year, after South Carolina lost to Iowa in the semi-finals, here’s what Dawn Staley had to say after comments from reporters got back to her.
South Carolina was then and is now a physical team. They are taller and bigger than most opponents. They also were and are mostly Black players while Iowa was and is mostly white players.
A year later, here we go with LSU and Angel Reese and an LA Times article and similar references but this time calling the game with UCLA a battle of “good vs evil” of “milk and cookies vs hot sauce” with LSU as the “Dirty Debutantes”. The writer later issued an apology and changed some of their language for the article but the damage had been done. This is not new treatment for LSU or for their star player Angel Reese, often portrayed as the villain to Caitlin Clark. Reese does trash talk. Openly. So does Caitlin Clark. Reese gets targeted as villainous and Clark as competitive.
Guess what? The women want to win, they are excellent players, they are as competitive as the men, they know all the same curse words.
Reese’s trash talk doesn’t bother me a bit-I like it. I have yet to see anything that she does that wouldn’t be normal and acceptable in the men’s game. And the vitriol she has received is exponentially worse. In an interview last week, she said that since they won the National Championship last year, she has not known peace but that she recognizes that she is here for all the young girls who look like her.
She has 2.8 million Instagram followers (in Warriors terms, slightly more than Andrew Wiggins, who never posts, but 15 million less than Klay Thompson, who rarely posts). She calls herself the Bayou Barbie. This has allowed some people to say that she is asking for attention with her platform. But she has not asked for death threats, or AI-created nudes of her or constant racist remarks about her.
This is from her final post game conference
Her competitiveness on the court, her love for fashion, her ability to break the rules of how things are supposed to be, it all reminds me of Serena Williams and how she received praise, but also constant racist and sexist remarks from fans and media about how Serena conducted herself on and off the court.
It’s a fan and media created controversy. Before the Elite Eight game, Reese made clear in an interview that she doesn’t hate Caitlin Clark but that once they are on the court, all friendships are off. Clark said the same.
This is what all the NBA players say - friends/brothers/college roommates off the court but rivals on it. But we have all kinds of opinions when the same sentiment comes from a young Black woman who is not looking for anyone’s approval.
Here’s her teammate, Hailey Van Lith, talking about the difference between how she is received and how Reese is:
Here’s Paige Bueckers, pointing out how the platform is readily given to white players in a sport with predominantly Black players. This is from her 2021 speech for Best College Athlete Women’s Sports, which she won as a freshman.
This year I joined a Facebook group for UConn women’s basketball and I mostly regret it. Sometimes it’s informative but more often there are fans who talk about how UConn plays the “right” way and other teams play the wrong way. They’ve railed against false eyelashes and big hair, how other teams are too physical, how they have tattoos, how they trash talk and how UConn is “classy.”
It’s so obvious it would be laughable if it wasn’t hurtful. And racist. And sexist. And exhausting, this constant stream of coded language for teams who are too Black, too celebratory, too confident in how good they are. UConn has restrictive rules - players must cover any visible tattoos, players are not allowed to wear nail polish during the season - that feel outdated and quaint. The UConn players are not being “classy”, they are following rules so they don’t have to run stairs after practice. Many of them have tattoos that they have to cover up before every game. That sounds more foolish to me.
This week has been such a strange combination of pure joy at watching amazing basketball and pure anger at how these women are talked about. Maybe it’s time to stop policing women’s bodies and their expression. The next time I write about women’s basketball, I’d love to talk about the actual game.
Because for real, don’t you wish you could do anything in your life as well as they play ball?
A Game At A Time Playlist (the songs that pop in my head while writing this)