hOOPS!

I don’t want to give anybody ideas here, but I am sorely puzzled by NCAA women’s basketball.

Last Sunday I surfed TV looking for a summary/highlights of the Michigan Wolverines pasting of the Iowa Hawkeyes in the ‘B1G’ men’s football (that sex qualifier may seem redundant, but I await the demand for a women’s football program under Title IX) conference championship game.

I settled on the Big Fourteen Ten network as a likely intelligence source on the assumption they’d be less likely, immediately post-football championship, to be screening reruns of women’s field hockey or some tour of the conference’s campus restaurants.

I was disappointed to find myself watching Michigan State vs Iowa women’s basketball. It was late in the game so I hung around to see if the men’s football news would appear when it was over.

I don’t know if women’s collegiate basketball is just Title IX messing with me, but “throws like a girl” has to take an insult back seat to “shoots like a girl.” I know women who are pretty good softball players, they could play on men’s teams without embarrassment.

None of the women playing basketball for Michigan State or Iowa could spell ‘jockstrap.’ This paucity of talent seemed unlikely to be concentrated in these two presumedly elite teams, so I went straight to the most elite women’s basketball source. Was WNBA talent any better? This video (5 min), admittedly cherry-picked WNBA lowlights, suggests not so much. But it was like watching MSU/IU.

I was led down a rabbit hole of research, since I haven’t watched a pro basketball game featuring either sex in twenty years.

There are ~144 WNBA players (~450 in the NBA), and the top 10% or so of WNBA players are conceivably good enough for limited play in the NBA. This small number explains the collegiate women’s basketball ineptitude. Females, on average, just aren’t very good at basketball. I sympathize. Neither am I.

For example of a player, here’s Elena Delle Donne, a 6’5″, 187 pound power forward and perennial WNBA star. An NBA equivalent might be Kevin Durant (6′ 10″ 240 lbs).

Comparing the NBA and WNBA is not apples to oranges, these are both apples. However, it’s like a Granny Smith vs. a Golden Delicious. The NBA, for example, has a smaller ball to hoop ratio, shorter shot clock, longer 3-point range, a longer game time, longer season, and longer play-offs. I digress. Back to the actual point of this post.

We know why males pretending to be females are not playing women’s football.

But, I asked myself, why aren’t MPtbF playing women’s basketball? The impact would be huge. I can’t figure out why there is no trans assault on NCAA women’s basketball.

Third rate males could change, read ‘destroy overnight’, female basketball. Where are they? MPtbF are ruining track and field, weight lifting, rugby, Mixed Martial Arts, and swimming for female athletes. Why aren’t they eliminating females from women’s basketball competition?

Can it be that women’s basketball is protected somehow by our Universities?

Well, not because it’s a cash cow. NCAA men’s 2019 basketball revenuewas $933,000,000 vs. women’s $266,000. Women’s revenue does not rise to the level of a rounding error. Still, scholarships for each are a billion dollars. There is an approximate total of 4300 scholarships offered in Division I Basketball for Men. There are 5025 scholarships available across women’s Division I basketball. There’s money on the table for MPtbF.

Maybe because basketball is popular enough to have a higher embarrassment profile? Watching men play basketball against women on national television would create much more negative publicity than swim meets of which very few are even aware.

But why would that stop them, and how would they get away with stopping it?

Can there be some aspect of the sport so repellant to MPtbF as to prevent even one from suing over their exclusion?

Anybody have a suggestion? I got nothin’.