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Women's College Basketball Update
The gap between the Super Bowl in mid-February and the start of the NBA playoffs in mid-April is a dead zone on the American Sports calendar. The only respite of any relevance is the three-weekend single-elimination tournament extravaganza that is March Madness. Interestingly, most of the hype this year has been from the women's bracket. The quarterfinal between LSU and Iowa was the most-watched women's basketball game of all time with 12.3 million viewers, which is more than last year's (men's) NBA Finals. It was a good game too.
What is going on? The WNBA is still completely irrelevant. Last year was a good year for them. They got about 700,000 viewers for the finals. The only active WNBA player I can name is Brittney Griner, and that's because she was the subject of an international incident.
As with most questions regarding women's social status, "is she hot bro?", is probably the best place to start. Here is the roster of current NCAA darlings Iowa. Here is the roster of the 2023 WNBA champion Los Vegas Aces. You'll notice I had to use a promotional Twitter post for that one. The Aces don't have photos of the players on their website. They aren't even trying.
How did this happen? What are the incentives that led to this?
The WNBA loses money. Not a massive amount of money (about 10 million dollars a year), but it isn't particularly close to being profitable. The NBA keeps the WNBA around for positive PR, and because getting little girls interested in basketball is good for the cultural relevance of the NBA. The NCAA Women's tournament exists because of Title IX. Any university that spends money on men's sports must also spend money on women's sports, lest they be sued for discrimination. Universities can't pay players directly, but recent court cases and rule changes mean that players are allowed to profit off of their "name image and likeness" ("NIL") through endorsements, sponsorships, and the like.
In men's sports, NIL has created a massive clusterfuck that is worthy of it's own post. In women's sports, results were much more banal and predictable. The hotties get all the money. There is an economic incentive to be and present oneself as attractive in order to get paid. You think Hailey Van Lith wears her hair like this because it helps her get buckets?
On the earned media side, Caitlin Clark is getting a lot of airtime on the sports networks. She is in fact putting up some impressive numbers, but I doubt she would be getting this much attention if she wasn't a cuteish white girl who isn't attractive enough to feel threatening to the middle-aged PMC women who complain about stuff.
Something to note here is the intersection between the preferred attire and aesthetic that women adopt and the financial incentives involved. Sure, Van Lith and Cameron Brink look cute in braids, but women in sports just wear braids pretty often without any incentive to do so. If they're going to have long hair (and they should, if they want to be attractive), braiding is one of the easier ways to get it out of your face, and it looks cute, and women like looking cute. You'll see tons of softball and cross-country girls in braids too and it's not like they're getting paid for it.
Agree, but I think you're underselling how entertaining of a player she is. She's literally the first women's basketball player I've ever intentionally turned games on to watch. I've gotten texts from basketball fan friends saying pretty much the same. It's like if you took Steph Curry and dropped him into a 2005 NBA game. Her opponents are just completely unprepared for the combination of range and creative passing. Her skillset is completely unlike any other women that I've watched.
The final thing that you touched on a bit but didn't quite get into is the race war aspect of it. There is absolutely a significant driving element of the wholesome Iowa girls beating a pretty villainous LSU team that also ties into racial stereotypes.
There are no lack of male sports athletes with hair that interferes with their ability to perform. How much would Troy Polamalu’s 40 time increase if he shaved himself bald? Probably a few hundredths. But it’s not a big enough factor to interfere with feeling comfortable in your look.
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caitlin clark is pretty fun to watch. the mens game this year doesn't have a similarly cool player, unless you like watching a 7'4 behemoth shoot free throws. 2024 is projected to be one of the weakest nba drafts in a long time.
college basketball at least can get alumni interested. the wnba has nothing of the sort
NCAA is no longer the default pathway to the NBA with overseas professional leagues, G-League and 1-and-done college stints all becoming more prevalent in the last 5 years. Plus the internationalization of Basketball means there's way more overseas talents.
It's hard to cultivate star power in College Basketball as a consequence, and in the meantime a lot of the Blue Blood programs are struggling which increases volatility and decreases interest.
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I don't know much about sports. But I've looked into TV ratings quite a bit and frankly I just don't trust them.
The main player is still Nielsen. There are competitors, but they're the mainstay, especially for US ratings (which are the most valuable to advertisers). And most of that data is still collected from people who voluntarily agree to be part of their measurement program. You can't volunteer for it, they have to approach you, perhaps by sending you something in the mail. They try to adjust for all demographics, but how could they? They have some device that they claim can listen to the audio and determine what you're watching but... I really doubt it's all that accurate. There are obvious questions like
and they just don't have valid answers for those. It's a rough measurement. They still ask people to fill out self-reports in booklets, you can imagine how accurate that would be. See this thread for some details: https://old.reddit.com/r/cordcutters/comments/11hd2sf/how_the_neilson_ratings_work_with_streaming_by_an/
So, I dunno. Maybe the women's college basketball finals attracts more of the sort of people chosen to be Nielsen families? Not that word, "families," they're probably not asking a lot of single guys hanging out at dive bars to gamble on whatever sports are on. It seems weirdly specific that people would be so into women's college basketball but not the WNBA.
I think they’ve spent decades trying to weight their viewership metrics with real data on who is actually watching TV. It’s probably flawed in some ways but I’m sure the issues you’ve thought about have been considered.
It’s kind of like how, say, young men are very unlikely to spend 20 minutes on a landline survey poll asking about political candidates, even though (despite low turnout) many millions of young men still vote. Polling orgs know this and correct extensively for it, not just by weighting the men they get but by adjusting for the kind of views young men who do answer the call might disproportionately have.
they try and correct for that. They still frequently get it wrong. There are multiple, competing polling organizations with different methods, which are mostly open-source, and are ultimately checked by the election itself where you got to find out who was right. TV ratings have none of that, it's just a black box where Nielsen swears that "we've got it figured out, don't you worry your pretty little head" and there's no objective test to see if they were right.
Nielsen is checked by reality. Since modern internet-connected cable boxes, certainly since streaming, companies have had the ability to compare Nielsen figures with the real number of screens. Sure, channels are often reluctant to sell those figures directly to advertisers unless they’re very good, and Nielsen knows household formation (ie number of viewers per household) in a way that Netflix doesn’t necessarily, but there are people in the industry who get both sets of figures. If they were way off Nielsen would probably know. They hire ex-streaming executives who know the figures.
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First off, this would be the same methodology and population sampled as in previous years, so whether the total magnitude is correct the change should be relatively close.
I think there are a few contributing factors.
She really is an incredibly annoying player. Constantly taunting opponents, instigating conflict, plays dirty, then acts like the victim when there's ever any blowback.
Hard disagree. I tuned in late, but that foul that caused her to foul out in that Iowa game was was very questionable in my opinion, and I thought she handled that much more maturely than star college athletes usually do. I did tune in late though, and I'm sucker for those eyelashes.
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Not if they're measuring a relatively small number of people, who change from year to year, and then wildly extrapolate from that with a methodology that also changes from year to year!
More broadly: It seems like that one particular basketball game is an outlier. Most of their games are in the 2-4 million range. Still great ratings, but not the same as 12 million. I guess people really love that LSU-Iowa rivalry? Seems weirdly specific to me, but then I'm not the kind of guy watching basketball.
Yes pretty much haha. Caitlin Clark drives huge ratings, and with LSU and Iowa meeting in the championship last year and driving a ton of interest, it was not shocking at all for it to have a seismic rating.
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LSU & Iowa were the two most popular women's teams of the last few years. That basically explains it.
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It's funny the WNBA can't capitalize on WNCAA interest when the latter is a feeder to the former (admittedly a lot of charismatic WNCAA players will go from being superstars in that arena to middling in the pro leagues, but still)
At risk of wildly extrapolating from my own experience with my peers, women generally don’t care that much about sports. They’ll watch if someone they know is on the team, or if the other members of their group want to watch or if their SO wants to watch, but they only rarely seek out sports on their own. They also don’t follow as closely even if they do watch. The male sports fans I know can name players, know stats, follow trades, know coaches, etc. so this also boosts the sports men like because it’s not just catching a weekend game, it’s following news about their team, it’s buying merch, attending in person (if one has the means).
I think the only way to get profitable as a women’s league is to do what women’s tennis does — make the players dress in cute outfits, push the players to be media personalities that women bond with, sell the kinds of merch that women buy because it makes them look cute. Have pinups for the men. The WNBA suffers because they can’t admit what their audience actually wants. The men want women’s sports to be hot pinups that look cute in short skirts. The women want to have pararelationships with successful women on social media. What they’ve done instead is treat the WNBA as a “men’s NBA, but with women,” which doesn’t work. Men follow men’s sports for the competition and women’s sports for the hotties.
Is woman's tennis a big moneymaker? I haven't heard much about it.
Women's Tennis benefits from being a bit more volatile and a bit less serve-driven than the Men's game.
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