Interesting question that Bryan discusses below – who is the women’s college basketball GOAT?
You could make a case for Brittney Griner, who led a Baylor team with only one other eventual WNBA player (Odyssey Sims) to a 40-0 record in 2011-12. In her final three seasons, Baylor’s record was 108-5.
You could go back to the ’80s and remember Cheryl Miller, who won the Wooden Award three years in a row. But the college game was still relatively new at the time, with a shortage of schools devoting a lot of resources…
What? The men’s game? Oh yes, right…
To be honest, the whole “women are better than men now” trope has gone a bit overboard. There’s nothing wrong with seeing women’s basketball get its due, thanks to generational talent and other compelling stories. But the men also deserve some attention.
What a strange sentence to write.
So enjoy the next few hours as we track to see if Connecticut can become the first repeat men’s champion since Florida in 2006 and 2007 or if dominant big man Zach Edey (7-foot-4 or 2.24 meters) takes Purdue to its first national championship.
Beau will be visiting soon. In the meantime, here’s Bryan Graham on the growth of the women’s game:
After the curtain finally fell on Caitlin Clark’s collegiate career and the final grenades and black confetti fell Sunday afternoon at Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, the all-time leader in college basketball history was finally able to reflect on a season that has recalibrated all expectations how women’s sports can be covered, commercialized and consumed.
In the past week alone, Clark’s games have set new ratings records for women’s basketball twice, with a third for the title game all but certain when Sunday’s overnights are released. Even South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley, who had just completed a perfect season for a second NCAA title in three years with a team that graduated all five starters (probably her best stretch of coaching to date), could not her victory not reach far. speech before paying tribute to the woman of the moment, proverb: “I would like to personally thank Caitlin Clark for taking our sport to the next level.”
Whether Clark is the best college player she’s ever played is up for debate — for me it’s still Maya Moore — but there’s no doubt the Hawkeyes star has done more to bring mainstream attention to the women’s game than anyone before her. Since drawing a record 55,646 fans for a preseason game in October at an outdoor football stadium, Clark and the Hawkeyes became appointment attendees. Iowa’s win over LSU in the Elite Eight drew 12.3 million U.S. television viewers, making it one of the most-watched sporting events of the past year outside the NFL. Their Final Four game against Connecticut on Saturday night exceeded expectations, averaging 14.2 million viewers and peaking at 17 million, better than every World Series and NBA Finals from last year.
You can read the full article below: