Why March Madness Belongs to the Women

There’s all the time an indication.

Last spring, I first spotted one thing particular was once taking place after I couldn’t stroll part a block in Dallas with out operating into massive packs of Iowa or South Carolina enthusiasts. There had been additionally my man buddies again house who, for the primary time, had been making plans their weekend across the ladies’s NCAA Tournament video games as an alternative of the boys’s. And all of the sports activities communicate radio channels had been discussing Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My spidey senses had been tingling.

I may just really feel it in my bones that the game was once primed for a step forward second, despite the fact that I couldn’t have imagined that almost 10 million other folks would music in for the Iowa-LSU nationwide name sport, shattering the former document for viewership of a ladies’s basketball sport. But I may just inform that the barrier of apathy have been damaged; those ladies, that late-game taunting, the game itself — it’d all be mentioned for days and weeks and months to come back.

I’ve the similar feeling at this time.

Another massive bounce is coming for a game that needs to be rising familiar with those features. As we head into March Madness, it’s the ladies’s aspect of the event this is taking middle level. It is the ladies’s stars who shine the brightest. It is the ladies’s sport with essentially the most intriguing storylines.

And … that’s now not even arguable!

“We’ve been on a steady incline,” USC trainer Lindsay Gottlieb mentioned right through my SiriusXM display Sunday night time. “You combine the star power in our game, the fact that you have some of these established stars that fans have really built a relationship with like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink — and then you add in this incredibly dynamic freshman class.

“What we’re seeing is that women’s basketball is a really marketable entity. People love it. We’re in a space where there’s an incredible amount of excitement around it. … It’s something that’s, really, a movement.”

We’ve observed the ones insanely lengthy strains of enthusiasts ready to get into arenas — any area — to look Clark play. More than 3 million other folks watched Clark’s Hawkeyes beat Nebraska in extra time within the Big Ten championship sport on CBS, with the target market peaking at 4.45 million (!) in extra time. Clark is so ubiquitous that she was once mentioned more than one instances right through this 12 months’s NBA All-Star Weekend’s broadcast … whilst her State Farm ads aired right through its breaks.

ESPN just lately introduced that this was once its most-watched ladies’s faculty basketball common season in additional than 15 years, its viewership up 37 p.c on ESPN platforms from remaining season. Its SEC championship remaining Sunday between LSU and South Carolina drew virtually 2 million audience, and the Pac-12 name fit at the identical day between USC and Stanford — the Trojans a No. 1 seed and the Cardinal a No. 2 seed within the upcoming event — drew extra 1.4 million audience, up 461 p.c from remaining season’s championship. Those 3 name video games out-rated 3 NBA weekend video games.

With extra eyeballs comes greater familiarity for enthusiasts, each new and previous. Now, they know the celebrities via first call best. Caitlin. Angel. Paige. JuJu. Cam. Hannah.

Quick! Walk into your community sports activities bar and ask somebody to call 5 males’s basketball gamers taking part in this week. Can they do it? I’m now not positive I’d guess a lager on that.

Recently on his podcast, KG Certified, Kevin Garnett made the similar level. “This is the first time watching college basketball where I know more girls than guys,” he mentioned.”This is the primary time we’ve were given ladies’s basketball forward of fellows’s basketball. Women’s faculty basketball is … electrical. It is blowing the man’s sport out of the water.” 

Of path, that received’t topic a lot after we sit down on our couches or bar stools for 14 instantly hours on Thursday and 14 instantly hours on Friday. We’ll watch the boys’s video games simply the similar, falling in love with Cinderellas even supposing they bust our brackets. We’ll fret over a trainer’s horrendous late-game clock control. And we’ll stay looking at the boys as a result of theirs has lengthy been the most productive postseason in sports activities.

But parity at the ladies’s aspect has modified the calculus a bit of. So has the brief nature of fellows’s faculty basketball; one-and-dones coupled with the switch portal has made it tougher than ever for gamers to turn into family names around the game nationally. And such a lot of of the boys’s largest stars — its Hall of Fame coaches — have retired and left the game with out its weightiness.

And that has opened a door for the ladies’s sport to run thru. This is the game with gamers who keep 3 or 4 years and develop in entrance of our eyes. This is the game with its Hall of Fame coaches nonetheless main the way in which — many themselves identified on a first-name foundation: Dawn, Geno, Tara, Kim — whilst parity will increase and school athletics evolves below their toes.

So, this week, I’ll be maximum desirous about Clark’s remaining event run and whether or not she will will the Hawkeyes to every other Final Four. I’ll wish to see JuJu Watkins, the freshman phenom who has revitalized USC’s ladies’s program, at the large level for the primary time. I’ll wish to faux I’ve part of the power in my day by day existence that Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo does on protection in only one sport. I’ll be on pins and needles ready to look if South Carolina can entire a really perfect season after falling simply quick a 12 months in the past.

There will indisputably be the standard Neanderthal takes, males who nonetheless attempt to declare that “nobody” watches ladies’s basketball regardless of all the proof on the contrary. Those critiques now get shouted down via the dads who bond with their daughters via taking them to video games and the mothers of little boys who put on Clark jerseys and don’t suppose there’s anything else odd about idolizing a feminine athlete. Those males can hang to their foolish little out of date punchlines that make no sense anymore, whilst we watch compelling basketball and sign up for this rocket send because it rises.

“Eyes were opened last year, and we just fed off of that momentum, and it didn’t ever stop,” Notre Dame trainer Niele Ivey advised me Sunday. “Great teams, great players — the women’s game is just hot.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos of Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Hannah Hidalgo: Eakin Howard / Adam Bettcher / Icon Sportswire, Joseph Weiser / Icon Sportswire)