Five Out: First Blood in the NCAA, the WNBA coaching carousel turns, Unrivaled and a frenzy for expansion
Caitlin Clark and A'ja Wilson won't be in Unrivaled, L.A. has a new head coach, Hannah Hidalgo gets the better of JuJu Watkins while UCLA topples South Carolina in a big week in women's basketball.
The double seasons in sports journalism are always some of the hardest. If you’re a sports writer or broadcasting for one of the affiliates (your local ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX), it’s around this period of time where the exhaustion hits. It’s championship season in the college fall sports, there’s a playoff push in the NFL while the winter sports start to find their footing. You’d think that the WNBA might take mercy on us, you know? Give us a quiet week so we can let the Monday discourse center exclusively on college hoops.
Not in this ecosystem, my friend.
We have so much that there’s a couple of Five Out point contenders that are going to be made into separate columns this week. Keep an eye out for our new weekly podcast ‘Ball Up Top: A WBB Podcast’ that will go out every Tuesday here on Substack, Apple, Spotify and all other audio platforms. We’ve got a lot more coming soon too so if you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, now might be the time!
Now…onward to the Five!
Lynne Roberts and Karl Smesko’s hiring signal a change in WNBA Philosophy…and a potential brain drain in the college ranks…
It was a bad week for lovers of the mid-range game. Two NCAA coaches whose philosophies most closely resemble the ‘Moreyball’ ethos — threes and layups — will now be leading the Atlanta Dream and Los Angeles Sparks. A clip of new Sparks head coach Lynne Roberts made the rounds with many fans concerned about what it would mean for budding star Rickea Jackson, who possesses one of the purest mid-range jumpers in the league already. It’s a worthwhile question, to be sure. But I’ll give some grace to Lynne on this: she did say in that same quote that catering systems to personnel is important. She’s also never had a player like Jackson’s caliber ever.
The system wide changes feel significant. The WNBA is starting to move outside of their general clique and rotation of longtime coaches and going outside of the family, so to speak. They’re finding dynamic mid-major leaders instead of trying to pull from a top end college program. And, to bring us back to center, they coach a play style that is more analytically driven and in alignment with the men’s game. But where I worry for the college game is in the looming brain drain on the horizon.
Coaches won’t leave a UConn or a Tennessee. Dawn Staley probably won’t leave South Carolina. If you have a well sourced NIL machine, you might not go anywhere either. But, for the first time it seems, the money being offered by the WNBA is enough to get college coaches to entertain the prospect of leaving. Some program builders are straight up retiring due to the transfer portal and NIL. With more expansion teams on the horizon and more coaching spots to fill, is there a long term concern of a brain drain within the middle of women’s college basketball? These positions have to be filled and if the money is finally good, what’s stopping that elite mid-major or up and coming high major coach from making the pro jump? And what happens when we start to lose all that collective knowledge? It’s something worth watching especially if the hiring trend continues.
Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson and Sabrina Ionescu won’t be playing in Unrivaled and that’s completely fine.
So Unrivaled released their full rosters (well, almost), named coaches, assigned teams and, for all intents and purposes, is ready to go. But the big news was that three of the biggest names in the sport would not be a part of the inaugural season down in Miami. Quickly, everyone decided to take sides in whether or not it was good, bad or somewhere in between.
To be honest, this feels like one of those situations where it’s perfectly okay to just sort of shrug. Would it have been noteworthy if the aforementioned three had joined up? From a labor perspective, yes. Having all of the W’s might in another league would be a nice bargaining chip to say “meet our CBA demands or we’ll just build out the league we have equity in.”
It’s interesting that all three players that said no are signed to Nike while some of the other top players, from Angel Reese to Breanna Stewart, are with other shoe companies. But honestly, I don’t think we’re missing much and the benefit of those players getting an offseason break is much better in the long run. Great as Unrivaled is, I’m here to watch 5-on-5 WNBA basketball. The 3x3 is a growing game but it isn’t getting me up and out of bed to immediately turn on the TV for. The whole recruitment of these top players really just seemed to boil down to another argument of ‘motion’ among top players anyway. The league will still be fun and fine and entertaining. Even if Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson or Sabrina Ionescu aren’t involved, it’s still worth watching. And, when the season begins, we get those players well rested and ready for a big summer of ball. Sounds like a good deal if you ask me.
Conference realignment is hurting the early season visibility of women’s college basketball…
I saw a lot of questions this week wondering about why the promotion for South Carolina vs. UCLA and USC vs. Notre Dame was so lacking. At first, I wondered the same until I looked at the TV listings and then the answer became really clear. Conference realignment has jacked up a lot of things in the collegiate sports landscape but I hadn’t considered until this week just how bad the ripple effects would be for women’s hoops.
Think about it this way. If the Big Ten/SEC media deals go through a year earlier does ESPN push Caitlin Clark’s senior year the same way? There’s no doubt that it continues to make headlines on Sportscenter the way JuJu Watkins has but does The Four Letters commit to the full on marketing run for the game if CC is guaranteed to almost never be on their network? At the end of the day, this is a business. Whatever we think ESPN’s allegiance to sports was once upon a time, it has become such a fractured and Animal Farm-like environment that you simply have no incentive to promote what your competitor is offering. These two top five matchups over the weekend were on Peacock/NBC and Fox Sports 1, respectively. We do not look at either of those channels or networks as the tastemakers within sports television. It’s why NBC Sports Network shuttered and why Fox Sports has gone through multiple rebrands in the last decade or so.
What’s going to be a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of longtime women’s hoops fans is understanding that we are all cogs in the machine. While there are plenty of advocates for the growth of the game, executives and those with equity are focused on making money. So if it feels like there’s generally less juice at points this year, some of that can be attributed to the biggest star in the game going to the WNBA. But there is an equal-if-not-greater impact from essentially taking USC, UCLA, Iowa, Ohio State and others off the network that we all associate with coverage of women’s hoops. So this season, word of mouth will be more important than ever. And if there were ever a time for the highlight factory social media handles to step up and help elevate the next generation of stars, this is it.
What did we learn from two Top 5 weekend matchups in NCAA women’s hoops?
Cori Close, please feel free to let me know I don’t know a damn thing. For years, I’ve wondered about the UCLA head coach’s ceiling. She could always get players but seemed to come up just a bit short in March. Was she too nice of a coach? Did she have the tactical acumen to stack up against Dawn or Geno or Kim Mulkey? This game felt like a big perception changer as the Bruins not only ended South Carolina’s two-season-long win streak but they vaporized them over four quarters. It’s also UCLA’s first win over an AP No. 1 program ever in women’s basketball.
It tells me that the depth, grit and skill from this Bruins team is national championship caliber, something I wasn’t sure of when we started the year. To be honest, I’d seen the offseason hype train movie plenty with UCLA over the last few years. But now it appears we’re actually getting a performance to match the casting’s .
You could say the same thing about Notre Dame, who I’ve tagged with the “call me when they make it to the Elite Eight” moniker since Muffet McGraw’s retirement. But their absolute dismantling of USC was stunning. Olivia Miles looks like she might be a lock to be picked second overall in the WNBA Draft. Hannah Hidalgo completely outplayed JuJu Watkins. The Irish are for real and have a budding post star in freshman Kate Koval. If it looks like this all year, there won’t be many teams that can stop the Irish.
As for South Carolina and USC, it feels like they needed the wake up call. Both teams have looked a little lax to start the year. It’s mystifying why Milaysia Fulwiley has been so underutilized at South Carolina. You can’t say the media are propping up sophomores like JuJu and Hidalgo over Milaysia if we don’t ever see the latter on the floor flashing the obvious talent she has. Losing Kamilla Cardoso has clearly affected the way the Gamecocks play but there’s a lot of time to get it figured out. If anyone is capable, it’s Dawn Staley.
The situation for the Women of Troy is a little murkier. Their system is reliant on essentially ‘choice routes’ for their players. But when you need structure, you sometimes can’t get it. It’s a system that trusts its’ players but what happens when defenses have an answer? Some transferred to USC to play in a system that empowers them but sometimes you need the adults in the room to get a handle on what the unit needs to do. I trust Lindsay Gottlieb to get it figured out but the Women of Troy’s first two major matchups (against Ole Miss and Notre Dame) do not engender the confidence that we had for them at the start of the year.
There might not be a JuJu Watkins type figure in this freshman class but there is plenty of budding star power…
For a little while on Bluesky (yup, I’m over there now), I changed my name to “Elina Aarnisalo Fan Acct”. After watching bits and pieces of the Bruins to open the year, I was extremely impressed by the Finnish freshman and how she could slash and score seemingly at will against South Carolina. Hers is a name we didn’t know coming into the year and while it doesn’t feel like there’s a “superstar” among this freshman class, it feels deep with legitimate talent that will grow into something serious.
I’m not quite sure why we haven’t managed to see any freshman make waves in the national media but I suspect part of it is ESPN not pushing the sport as much this season and that some of the best freshmen aren’t playing at major programs. Sarah Strong, Allie Ziebell and Morgan Cheli are playing behind the Paige Bueckers media machine. Joyce Edwards has had a decent start but is mostly coming off the bench for South Carolina.
Instead, the stars have come from places like Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Rutgers. Not quite places with vibrant women’s basketball cultures and populations. But I’ll promise you this: if you tune in to watch a Jaloni Cambridge, a Mikayla Blakes or Kiyomi McMiller, you will not be disappointed. Don’t forget Michigan’s Syla Swords, who balled against the Gamecocks in the season opener as well as Notre Dame’s Kate Koval who might be the next dominant big in the NCAA. The coverage game is a funny thing as it tends to be kind of random in who manages to stick and who doesn’t. Sometimes the answer is obvious, like in the case of Caitlin Clark. She was doing things that the game hadn’t seen before. Other times, it’s just kind of who fits the vibes. JuJu Watkins isn’t redefining paradigms of the game. Instead she’s just really damn good and has ‘aura’, that hard to define and intangible quality that makes her a box office sell. Will these freshman have that if we give them the attention they deserve? I’d like to think so. But it might not be until February or March, when players really get their moments in front of a national audience, to show the world who they are. If you’ve been watching from the tart then at least you get to say ‘yeah I’ve been watching them for awhile’.