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Notes -
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.
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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