It is unlikely that the women’s college-basketball national championship game will get better TV ratings than the men’s version. But the fact that it’s even a possibility is truly remarkable.
Last year, the dull men’s final between Connecticut and San Diego State yielded an average of 14.7 million viewers, a record low, while the women’s final between Angel Reese’s LSU and Caitlin Clark’s Iowa reached 9.9 million viewers, a record high. On Monday, Reese and Clark squared off in a tournament rematch, this time in the quarterfinals. 12.3 million people watched Clark lead Iowa to a convincing victory, a number that shattered the all-time record for any women’s game and compared favorably to the 2023 World Series and NBA finals. If Clark ends up facing Dawn Staley’s undefeated South Carolina for the championship, the women might surpass the men for the first time. And if it doesn’t happen this year, it will soon.
Regardless of the ratings — and I’ll admit that they’re a sad, corporatist way to think about sports fandom anyway — Caitlin Clark is the gateway drug for casual sports fans paying attention to the NCAA tournaments. The further she goes, the more people are going to watch. A lot of people in your life will be paying attention to college basketball this coming weekend, and she’s the primary reason why. So if you want to know what’s going on, and more importantly who to cheer for, now’s the time to brush up.
We usually do a Sweet Sixteen Rootability Rankings, but we were very busy with Shohei Othani last week. So hopefully this will suffice: Here are our men’s and women’s Final Four Rootability Rankings.
The Huskies are trying to do something no men’s team has pulled off since Florida in 2005-06: win two consecutive titles. (They’ve already won five this century, if you were wondering why you were already sick of them.) The constant for last year’s UConn team and this year’s isn’t a player, but the coach, Dan Hurley, a total madman of a human being notorious for his wild superstitions before games. Some of these rituals are strange but harmless, like his insistence on eating exactly eight M&Ms before tipoff (none of which can match the team colors of his opponent). Some of them, though, veer toward the maniacal, including his obsession with wearing the same underwear every game. That led to a deeply uncomfortable feature-story moment on the TBS telecast before Connecticut’s Elite Eight blowout win over Illinois, in which Hurley’s wife demonstrated how she cleans her husband’s underwear on the road, something she had already done on Instagram. Andrea Hurley seems like a very nice person, one who deserves better in life than this. She went to college! She is smart! Her parents had hopes and dreams for her! Anyway, you shouldn’t cheer for any team to win two titles in a row, not least one as dominant as Connecticut (who have been involved in a series of boring blowouts for two years of this tournament running now), but even if you’re prone to doing so, the underwear washing should be the bright red line you can’t cross.
Last year, the Crimson Tide created controversy over their decision to play star Brandon Miller despite his connection to a murder on campus. (And by “connection,” I mean he “drove the gun to the scene of the crime.”) That team bowed out in the Sweet 16, saving us all some deeply uncomfortable conversations on college basketball’s biggest stage. (Illinois’s loss in the Elite Eight this year served a similar function; its star Terrence Shannon was playing despite being charged with rape.) This year’s Alabama team broke through, thanks partly to some excellent three-point shooting and mostly to an extremely favorable bracket breakdown; they were placed in the weakest region and only played one team, wobbly No. 1 seed North Carolina, seeded higher than them. This is Alabama’s first-ever appearance in the Final Four, which would make them likable and very easy to cheer for if the sport of football did not exist. Alas, it does.
Three weeks ago, North Carolina State, which had a mediocre regular season and thus no chance to earn an at-large berth to the NCAA Tournament, was simply playing out the string, saddled with the indignity of a Tuesday afternoon ACC Tournament game no one was watching, along with the seemingly impossible task of winning five games in five days to earn the league’s automatic bid. Somehow they pulled that feat off, and then, when they got to the NCAAs, rattled off four more wins. That’s nine win-or-go-home victories in a row. Rather than shrinking from the moment, they look to be having the time of their lives, especially star center D.J. Burns Jr., a transfer from Winthrop listed at 275 pounds, which sure seems several sacks of potatoes light. He has been magical for the last month, playing with such unmitigated joy that he’s impossible not to cheer for. One of his newest fans? NBA MVP Nikola Jokić, a guy who knows from being a heavy guy with nimble feet and a fertile basketball mind. Jokić has already said he wants to play with Burns Jr. in the NBA. Normalize rotund basketball players!
One of the best college-basketball programs to never win a national championship, the Boilermakers are in the Final Four for the first time since 1980. The primary reason is their two-time National Player of the Year Zach Edey, a seven-foot-four monster who is essentially impossible to guard by anyone who isn’t already in the NBA. (His games very much resemble that commercial where Charles Barkley knocks around middle-manager dorks in a rec league.) This would be annoying if Edey himself weren’t so inherently likable. He’s an affable Canadian who didn’t start playing basketball until his sophomore year of high school, lives with his Chinese immigrant mom, is famous for staying for hours after every game signing autographs, and is not against donning a funny hat once in a while. Edey is not the only good player on this team, but he’s the centerpiece of everything they do. A year after Purdue suffered a shocking loss to No. 16 Fairleigh Dickinson, this is the best team they’ve ever had, and probably their last chance for a long time to get that long-elusive national championship. When they play Connecticut in the final — and they will — you must root for Purdue, unless you are willing to publicly clean Dan Hurley’s underwear.
Their appearance in the Final Four isn’t quite as unlikely as the men’s squad’s is — the women have been one of the top 20 teams all season, despite being unranked heading into it, and they reached the Elite Eight just two years ago — but it’s nevertheless a surprise to see the Wolfpack here. This is their first Final Four since 1998, and they’re undeniably playing the role of the plucky underdog. The problem is that the women’s tournament is far less amenable to underdogs than the men’s tournament is, and that they’re playing an all-time juggernaut in South Carolina. Their last-place rootability ranking here is not because they’re not an enjoyable team; it’s because they’re going to get absolutely drilled by the Gamecocks, and I don’t want you to waste any of your important and non-replenishable rooting energy here when you will need it elsewhere.
One of the odder aspects of the recent women’s college-basketball explosion is that Geno Auriemma has been such a small part of it. The Connecticut coach has been the sport’s central figure for decades, winning a stunning 11 national championships since taking over in 1985, and served as the polarizing “love them or hate them” bad guy in the sport before that position was usurped by LSU coach Kim Mulkey. His teams are still excellent — they missed the Final Four last year but hadn’t before then since 2007 — but he hasn’t won a title in eight years. Auriemma made headlines last week when he said his team’s star guard Paige Bueckers was better than Clark, which might sound controversial but, considering how well Bueckers has been playing (28 points, 10 rebounds, six assists in the Elite Eight win over USC), is starting to look possible. We’re about to get our answer on the biggest possible stage.
Dawn Staley could not be any more different than Auriemma while remaining a member of the same species. But if it hadn’t been for a shocking Final Four upset last year, she’d be within shouting distance of his record of 111 consecutive wins, a streak that ended in 2017. It was Caitlin Clark who ended South Carolina’s 42-straight streak in the Final Four last year, and the Gamecocks responded this season by winning 36 more in a row. Yep, they’re 36-0: Staley’s record the last three years is a jaw-dropping 108-3. (She also went 45-0 as head coach of the women’s national time right before that run. Pretty good!) South Carolina still has a bad taste in their mouth after losing last year, though, and they have played with ferocity from the first tip-off this season. But we said they were hard to stop last year, too, and Clark stopped them.
We are open to the notion that the widespread acceptance of Caitlin Clark as basketball hero has a certain “nice Midwestern white girl who turns out to be a superstar” vibe to it — not dissimilar to the way Larry Bird ushered in a new era of NBA fandom. But this does a disservice to Clark as a player. Sure, she’s in State Farm commercials, and she knows her obligation to the larger narrative, but don’t get it twisted: She is a relentless, gnarling competitor. It is telling that there has been a recent backlash — often among right-wing professional social-media trolls — against Clark for cursing, pouting and generally acting un-lady-like in her games: There is a gulf between what many people want Clark to be and what she actually is, but that should make the discerning fan like her more, not less. She’s a transcendent player who has that Jordan/LeBron/Bird/Kobe alpha competitiveness, which will put some people off but further establishes her as the top-shelf superstar the sport needs. The more people end up disliking Clark, honestly, the better this is going to work out for everybody. Iowa lost in the national final last year, and Clark has already announced she’s turning pro at the end of the season: This is her last chance to take care of the unfinished business of winning her (and Iowa’s) first national title. There’s nothing better for women’s college basketball, women’s basketball, women’s sports in general, sports in general — than everyone gathering around their televisions to watch her, in the Final Four and for many, many years afterward. Go ahead and cheer for her. It’ll be best for everyone in the long run. It is also extremely fun.
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