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Women’s college basketball is caught between a rock and a hard place and both are located in Connecticut, home of the perennial and maybe forever national champions and this year’s current No. 1 overall seed.
Sunday’s appearance in the Final Four against No. 2 seed Oregon State will mark the Huskies’ ninth consecutive national semifinal. If they win it all, it will be their fourth-straight national title and it will lead to the ruination of the sport on the collegiate level. It was the subject of an ESPN ’30 for 30′ special on Sunday morning and caused people like head coach Geno Auriemma to defend the level of excellence by comparing his program to Tiger Woods and the symphony.
Auriemma’s defense was nothing but a silly narrative because, simply, the Huskies have taken competitiveness out of the sport. Even when Woods was dominating golf, there was always a better chance that someone would win a major than there is a chance of someone other than UConn winning a title. When people go to a symphony to hear music, they don’t go expecting a winner and loser. Sports are all about competition and people go see sports for different reasons than they do art.
The rock and the hard place for women’s basketball is that UConn has set the bar so high that all five first-team high school All-Americans (and many second-teamers) want to go there; and they cannot be blamed for doing so, because that is where the fans and championships are. They have the best player in the country, Breanna Stewart, but they usually have that every year.
When the 10 best players in the country go to a school with the best coach, the deck is impossibly stacked in this rigged game. It has nothing to do with women and everything to do with the rock and the hard place UConn has chosen to live. No one wants to see a rerun every year, so TV sets will be turning off exponentially.
What is good for them is bad for the sport, and the sad part is that there is really no solution in sight.
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