Women have taken over the NCAA Tournament

PHILADELPHIA — Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Kim Mulkey drew a record 12.3 million eyes to women’s college basketball Monday night. Serious hoopheads, casual sports fans, and 64-year-old grandmas, like my sister, tuned in to witness conflict, drama, talent, skill and a striking green pantsuit.

And that was just the NCAA women’s quarterfinal. Imagine what the Final Four will be like Friday and Sunday.

It’s Thursday, and we need to take a breath because the ride has been breathtaking. On opening weekend for Major League Baseball, the day before NBA MVP Joel Embiid returned from injury, with the Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal still lingering, women’s college basketball ruled the sports landscape. Their talent and their skill, their charisma and their character, made the women’s Elite Eight the elite story of the weekend. They’re just getting started.

As of Wednesday afternoon, most of the women’s Final Four tickets available on StubHub.com listed for more than $1,400, which was about $200 more than the men’s. And the men are not without storylines.

Purdue center Zach Edey is a 7-foot-4 Canadian of Chinese descent who is the reigning men’s player of the year. On Saturday, Edey will play N.C. State, the sixth 11-seed to make it to the Final Four and the first N.C. State team to get there since Jim Valvano’s Cinderella team won it all in 1983. This Wolfpack is anchored by 6-9, 275-pound DJ Burns Jr., the roundest mound of rebound since Charles Barkley, who might have a brighter future on an NFL offensive line than an NBA frontcourt. UConn is back to defend its title, too, and it’ll face Final Four newcomer Alabama on Saturday.

Historically, the guys would draw the spotlight, but the men’s game has become a maelstrom of portal-hopping, one-and-done mercenaries; at least, more so than the women’s game. Maybe this is the new normal.

In the past three weeks or so, at the hands of experts and idiots alike, the top personalities of the women’s game have been the subject of adoration, adulation, criticism, sexism and racism.

It has been glorious to witness.

Of course, sexism and racism are never glorious, but that’s not quite the point here. The point, for me, is that it — all of it — matters to you. That you’re angry at the slings and arrows. That you’re rooting for them, or against them. That they are more relevant today than they were yesterday, but maybe not as relevant as they will be tomorrow.

Monday sent two teams to the women’s Final Four and sent two others home, and it might well be the high point of women’s sports this year, but what a ride it has been.

The fact that Mulkey is a crass and tasteless bully is less significant than the fact that much of America now very deeply cares that Mulkey is a crass and tasteless bully. Mulkey, whose outfits often are as alarming as her comments, is a basketball icon. She won the first women’s NCAA Tournament in 1982 as a 5-4 point guard at Louisiana Tech, won an Olympic gold medal in 1984, and has won four NCAA Tournaments as a coach, including last season’s. Also, her middle name is Duane. She is compelling.

So is Reese, a 6-3 lightning rod who got suspended in high school for punching a girl, began her career with two seasons at Maryland, became a two-time All-American at LSU, and famously taunted Clark in last year’s championship game.

Which brings us to Clark, the free-range bomber and the all-time leading scorer in NCAA Division I history. She earned the taunt from Reese because Clark taunts and trash talks like a professional wrestler. Literally. Her John Cena mimic after a 40-point triple-double in last year’s Elite Eight kind of started all of this.

There’s so much more.

It’s enticing that the best women’s player is JuJu Watkins, a do-everything freshman at Southern Cal, who lost in the Elite Eight to UConn and Geno Auriemma, the best coach in history, who, with typical Philly-area brashness, says his best player, Paige Bueckers, is a better player than Clark or Watkins or Reese, et al.

Whatever. That does not matter.

What matters is that all of this matters so much.

Finally

As a person who’s covered women’s sports for 34 years, I just think it’s super cool that we’re obsessing over whether Dawn Staley’s South Carolina team can go undefeated, or will the N.C. State women’s team end that run Friday? My first big-time beat out of college was the Syracuse women’s basketball team. I’ve covered four women’s Final Fours. My family’s Christmas wish? A subscription to ESPN+ so we could watch women’s college basketball. The U.S. women’s national soccer team is appointment TV in my house. Personally, I’d rather watch the LPGA in Las Vegas this week than the PGA in San Antonio because I’d rather see Danielle Kang than Jordan Spieth.

There are lots of personalities involved in this women’s tournament, but Clark is the engine. Her game recalls Steph Curry because her release is so quick and her range is so deep; she made more 3-pointers from 25 feet this season than inside it; the NBA line is 23 feet, 9 inches at its peak. She also, like Steph, loves to celebrate herself in the moment.

And, like Steph, she shows up. She drew more than 55,000 fans, a women’s attendance record, to an outdoor game in October at Iowa’s football stadium, and dropped a triple-double. Clark admits to feeling pressure as the current face of the game — she makes at least $3.1 million in NIL money from sponsors such as Nike, State Farm, and Gatorade — but in her last five games (the Big Ten tournament championship and four NCAA Tournament games) she’s averaging 32.6 points, about the same as her regular-season average. Her NIL benefactors are getting a bargain.

There will be toxicity and controversy with every moment of public concern. It’s part of being a public concern. The toxicity will arise in proportion to the magnitude of the concern.

It certainly was not OK to call LSU’s basketball players “dirty debutantes,” as did one dog-whistling columnist in the Los Angeles Times, but it’s delightful that the dog whistle was amplified into a foghorn instead of being ignored, as it might’ve been just a few years ago. Mulkey threatened to sue The Washington Post in the days before it published a harsh profile that delved into her past, which, of course, served only to amplify the interest in what was a relatively boilerplate story. Before their Elite Eight game, Reese felt compelled to say: “Me and Caitlin don’t hate each other.”

Again, it’s bad that these women have had to deal with the anxieties related to their suddenly magnified fame.

But it’s good that they have suddenly magnified fame.

They’ve deserved it for a long time.

At all levels

When Brett Brown was fired in 2020, I suggested that Philly dawg Dawn Staley — South Carolina’s coach and the best ambassador women’s college basketball has ever had — replace Brown as the Sixers’ head coach, instead of Doc Rivers. I think we all agreed that I was right about that one.

And if you think that was just click-hunting, understand that former Sixers scout and developmental coach Lindsey Harding, now with the Stockton (Calif.) Kings, was just named the G League coach of the year.

I saw her coming, too.

Nobody is arguing that women’s sports are “better” than men’s sports. They’re not. They’re not worse, either. It’s like arguing that Chinese food is better than Italian, or that historical fiction is better than biography. The products are different and everyone has their own taste.

Tastes are changing. Financial giant Deloitte in November projected elite women’s sports would generate more than $1 billion in revenue for the first time in 2024.

As for the ticket issue: Yes, the women’s venue in Cleveland is an arena, and much smaller than the men’s, which is a football stadium outside of Phoenix. But two years ago, when the men played in the Superdome, their tickets cost more than the women’s, who played at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

Can Clark, Reese, Bueckers, and, eventually, Watkins carry their massive popularity into, and through, their WNBA careers? Sue Bird and Brianna Stewart and Lisa Leslie did not. That was then.

They have a better chance now than ever before.

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