Five Out: SEC Coin Flips, Diana Taurasi Retires On Her Own Terms and IT'S TOURNAMENT SEASON!!!
In a loaded Five Out this week, we discuss a wrap to the NCAA regular season, the postseason ahead and one last shoutout to a WNBA GOAT.
It’s officially Tournament season, folks. Hard to believe we were just back in November, getting ready to predict who would be a conference champion in a year of realignment. For the most part, the races stayed compelling (although I do miss my beloved Pac-12) and now we have a lot of fun matchups ahead.
Diana Taurasi’s retirement took most of the headlines in the last week and rightfully so. One of the GOAT’s of the sport gets to hang it up on her own terms and I’m sure a big chunk of this NCAA Tournament will be devoted to honoring her appropriately (more on that in a second).
In the meantime, we’ve got a ton of content coming to No Cap Space WBB this month. We’ve got features and fun add-ons for our paid subscribers and a mountain of Tournament related content free and open to all. All are welcome here! Now, to the column…
1. Yes, a coin flip to decide the SEC is dumb but boy did it make for some great television…
Let’s be honest, the Coin Cam was one of the dumbest and greatest ideas ESPN has ever had. To have a cutaway to a coin in the middle of South Carolina’s battle with Kentucky felt like a scene straight out of Friday Night Lights. Is it a good idea? No. It’s a terrible way to decide who gets the top seed in your conference tournament. The SEC’s rules on this are wild given that there’s only two layers of tiebreakers before we get to the coin flip. Granted, the league is a lot bigger this year and there isn’t the same type of round robin scheduling that there’s been in past seasons. But, as it stands, it’s head-to-head results and then your winning percentage vs. conference opponents and then you just kind of…give up and say fuck it, flip a coin. It makes me think about that Futurama episode where the parallel universe is the same in every way except coin flip results are reversed. What do you think is happening over there this morning?
But, even though the coin flip is a little hokey, it makes for great television. To have both teams on camera watching Greg Sankey flip a coin to decide the top seed of the SEC conference tournament is kind of hilarious. It almost makes me want a coin flip for more things. Give me reactions. Give me Greg Sankey. Give me all the pomp and circumstance and it just meaning more of the SEC distilled down to a 60 year old man flipping a commemorative coin to decide the fates of many. That’s appointment viewing in my book.
2. It feels like JuJu Watkins may have locked up National Player of the Year this weekend…
Boy, I’ll say this for USC’s superstar: she makes it a point to bury UCLA every single time the two crosstown Los Angeles rivals play one another. Dating back to her freshman year, she’s absolutely owned the Bruins in every single way with legendary performance after legendary performance. This time, it was 30 points, 5 assists, 3 rebounds and 3 blocks as the Women of Troy took home a Big Ten regular season title in a Top 5 rivalry finale.
So much of the National Player of the Year race is based on narratives, storylines and playing your best when everyone is watching. Right now, it feels like Watkins has the best ‘NPOY Moments’ especially late in the season and because of that I have a hard time believing that she hasn’t taken prohibitive frontrunner status to be named the top player in NCAA women’s basketball.
Her top competition has been good but not great in the biggest moments down the stretch. I still think Lauren Betts is the other top choice here but when you look at the head-to-head matchups, it makes me question if voters are going to see past the individual matchups and vote on the full body of work.
Paige Bueckers will get knocked because of the lack of day to day competition in the Big East and her counting stats aren’t fabulous against top non-con opponents. Mikayla Blakes has two 50+ point games as a freshman but Vandy is fighting a branding and team success metric when it comes to stacking her up against JuJu. Hannah Hidalgo’s performances in their two losses to NC State and Florida State felt like stumbles in the race while JuJu pulled ahead. Ta’Niya Latson is in a similar boat, having had a NPOY performance against Notre Dame (albeit buried on the ACC Network) but followed up with a tough 3-21 outing against Duke this weekend.
All that to say that it feels like JuJu has the lead right now. The machine seems to be behind her but I’d love to see the national media start to push a more compelling race between multiple players especially as some of the top performers get their time on cable or network channels in front of wide audiences.
3. Diana Taurasi deserves a proper sendoff and I hope the WNBA does it right this time…
I wrote a column for our paid subscribers (which, give it a shot if you love ball!) about how the WNBA has a real shot to make good on years of fumbling the legacies of their legends. Whether it’s Candace Parker, Sylvia Fowles or Seimone Augustus, the league has had trouble really leveraging the tools at its’ disposal to make sure that the past generations of superstars are kept on a pedestal with the current generation.
The biggest concern I’ve had lately — and a reason we have The Legendarium — is that as more fans come into the league, the easier it will be for them and their media partners to wash away the past of what made this league great. What makes Taurasi’s retirement such a unique opportunity is that her career has greater longevity than many of the players that have already retired in the last half decade. She was already a star in the league by the time Parker, Maya Moore, Fowles or Augustus were drafted. There is a very clear tie to the early 2000’s and the nascent years of the WNBA. Use that to your advantage! DT might not have wanted a farewell tour in the traditional sense but there’s no reason to not try to sell her legacy in the year ahead.
There will be warranted questions about how the WNBA positions its’ black former superstars vs. its’ white ones and, while I think it’s a fair argument, I don’t know if it’s the right one to make with respect to Taurasi. Personally, I place her on a tier above Fowles, Augustus and Moore, for instance. The only players that are on DT’s tier, in my eyes, are Candace (who the league did fumble with regard to honoring her in the year after retirement), Cynthia Cooper, Lauren Jackson, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes. She needs the royal treatment especially during a time where we run the risk of the WNBA entering a brave new world without all the women who helped build it. DT could be the first player to kickstart a wave of honoring past legends. It would be a perfect way to bridge eras of fans that don’t seem to understand each other very well right now and pave a new way forward for how we talk about the WNBA. Here’s hoping.
4. Mark Campbell’s TCU is officially on the national stage…
Whatever you want to say about TCU, about Sedona Prince and the moral cost of winning, you also have to say that the gamble has paid off on the floor. Believe me when I say, I don’t like it at all. The Dallas Morning News had a fantastic column last week about how Prince rose to prominence while calling out double standards and now benefits from the very same concept. But it is worth noting that there’s been a bit of a sea change (for the worse, in my opinion) in college sports where the ends justify the means in ways they didn’t just five years ago. You can call it a reflection of the culture writ large but it’s clear that what happened off the floor didn’t affect TCU enough to make a choice about her one way or another.
Now, I don’t say that to down Mark or the job he, Xavi and the rest of the staff have done there. Generally, I’ve had great interactions and discussions with all of them from Oregon to Sacramento State where I covered them both. Would I do it differently if I were a coach? Sure. But I’m not. Journalistically, I think it’s fair to not gloss over your star players off-court controversies while still praising the on-court product and the job Campbell has done turning TCU into a national power. The win in Waco over Baylor was an announcement to the world that the Horned Frogs are going to be a Big 12 contender for as long as Campbell and his staff are there. Prince, for all her controversies, has had a season that we have waited years for. This was the 6’7, multifaceted, rangey and lengthy center that Kelly Graves raved about when he got her to Oregon off a transfer from Texas. While there’s an argument to be made that this is a player of WNBA age stunting on college aged girls, the eligibility is the eligibility. She’s here and she’s been excellent.
The emergence of Hailey Van Lith has been one of the more heartwarming stories of the season (TCU contains multitudes, after all) while the supporting cast of Madison Conner, Agnes Emma-Nnopu and Donovyn Hunter has raised the Frogs’ floor to a team that very well could wind up in the Elite Eight come the end of March. They play an insanely fun style and have a sense of belief that matters when you get into this time of the year. While I understand some fans who might not be able to root for them because of the controversy associated with Prince, I’d tell you to get used to hearing their names this March. Mark Campbell is building a juggernaut in the state of Texas and is, for my money, the National Coach of the Year this season.
5. It’s March, folks!! Let’s have some fun.
On Tuesday, March 4th, Tournament season officially begins. The Horizon and Sun Belt kick us off early in the morning before the SEC, Big 12, ACC, A-10, OVC, Big Ten, Big South and Summit get rolling the following day.
To me, this might be one of the best Tournament seasons we’ve had since the 2018-2019 season. I hesitate to rate the COVID years because of the variance associated with different conference’s pandemic regulations. And, for the last couple years, it’s felt like we have very specific matchups that everyone is waiting to get to.
This year? It’s a wide open field. TCU, as I mentioned, is suddenly a legit Final Four contender. South Carolina, UConn, UCLA, USC, Notre Dame, Texas and LSU all have deficiencies and positives. The Women of Troy and the Huskies, in my opinion, are playing their best basketball right now but that isn’t to say another team can’t begin to peak in their own league brackets this week or next. But what makes this time of year the best is that we get to really see the women we’ve been watching all season assert themselves on a national stage with new viewers paying attention. That’s the game growth that we love to get behind here at No Cap Space WBB. If nothing else, March is a celebration of the year we had and a coronation of those that will continue to move this sport forward into its’ next era. The parity and openness of the field this year will make for, in my opinion, one of the best brackets in recent memory even if the TV numbers might not have a Caitlin Clark and/or Angel Reese bump. In an era in which superstars command a lot of fan and media attention, this year in women’s basketball actually grants us the best of both. We’re watching the JuJu’s and Hannah’s of the world as well as Texas or South Carolina as a team. And everyone has a shot to take home a title. That’s what it’s all about. Let’s have some fun.