Every Sport Should Be More Like Women’s College Basketball

If you didn’t like that, you probably just aren’t very fun. 

The final weekend of the women’s college basketball season gave us no less than: the early leader for Game of the Year (Iowa vs. South Carolina); two upsets that immediately enter the NCAA canon (Iowa taking down the undefeated South Carolina juggernaut, then LSU knocking Iowa off in the natty); and an ocean of shit talk, inhabited by several vibrant and unforgettable figures. It was, pretty indisputably, the most exciting women’s tourney ever, and surely the most talked-about, too. More than that, it hit all the notes you want high-level sports to hit. 

The numbers bear that out. At its peak, 6.6 million people were tuned into Iowa-South Carolina on Friday night. Vivid Seats reported that the Final Four’s average ticket price was $272, setting a modern record. Attendance records fell, too, with upwards of 19,000 people attending both the national semifinals and the championship game. It was the most viewed and most hyped women’s Final Four in history, and for good reason. 

Largely responsible for the excitement? The two marquee superstars who stole the show all weekend. LSU’s Angel Reese and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark gave performances that will inspire a new generation of ballers to work on both their game and their pettiness—and managed to kick off a national discourse about whether that type of thing is unbecoming (it’s not), classless (also not; that’s typically a dog whistle used to attack Black athletes), or bad for the game (it actually rules). 

The fact that these conversations are happening at all marks a major step forward for the women’s game, which has long been unfairly dismissed by misogynistic and merely ignorant fans. The edge lords missed out on some generational hooping this weekend. Clark’s 41 points and eight assists to clip the Gamecocks will go down as one of the best individual nights in college basketball history, full stop. The list of unfathomable Clark stats is about as long as her pull-up threes, which seemed to explore outer space before splashing through the net. 

Clark has now played 100 games in an Iowa uniform. She’s been held to single-digit points in exactly one of them. In nine postseason games this year—Iowa’s three conference tournament games plus six more during the big tournament—she scored 265 points. (For context: Iowa’s football team put up 230 during their 2022 season.) She had 40 points in back-to-back NCAA Tournament games, becoming the first woman to ever accomplish that feat. She brought a countless number of eyeballs to the women’s game. And yet there was one giant she couldn’t slay.

Let’s talk about Angel Reese. The LSU forward, Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA Tournament, and newly-crowned champion had a double-double in every one of the Tigers’ tourney games. One of those included 25 points and 24 boards as she outrebounded the Michigan Wolverines all by herself in the Tigers’ second-round matchup.