DobbsRover2
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- Aug 27, 2011
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So again HuskyNan throws out that grenade-type link, and again I will apologize in advance to all of those BYers who are of the "women's college basketball is slow, a snooze to watch, and totally predictable." How could it be otherwise, especially when the friends you watch the games with are flipping their calendar sheets as they unsuccessfully try to stifle big yawns.
Kevin Duffy of the CT Post jumped on the runaway nationwide band wagon of articles about how feeble the WCBB tournament is now that the Baylor-Griner-Sims juggernaut has gone bye-bye. The sadness of the sports broadcasting networks and writers is certainly understandable. At least half of the America that might have had an interest in the WCBB tournament have likely drifted away now that the name recognition and star glitter of Griner is gone, though if you read the boards it seems an unfair share of that interest was misogynistic. And a few writers that thought they could plump down on the couch and type out the "Baylor the Unbeatable" stories may have to actually do a few minutes of research about women's college basketball now to come up with an angle for an article, if they actually are still interested in covering the smudgy Louisville-Cal-ND-UConn slate of action. And admittedly, Duffy who covers the women Huskies fairly well is likely playing devil's advocate versus a discreet but noticeably big sigh of relief that was emitted into the Connecticut atmosphere after the Bears went down.
But of course this is not just about sadly waving farewell to the Griner money maker, this is also about putting out the usual trite tripe about the WCBB's supposedly substandard tourney. For Duffy it's the "painful predictability" of the WCBB tournament where " any unexpected result could be viewed as a positive." Thanks Kev, at least it's not all totally negative. And after bemoaning the loss of Griner shine as likely not being so great for the game (okay, that's fine), he goes off on the usual spiel about how the MCBB with all of it's one-and-done and constant frenzy of upsets that knock star teams and star players out of the tournament has just the right balance to excite the viewers. In the MCBB the overwhelming favorite doesn't necessarily win unlike in the WCBB so that's great and exciting, except that when the aberration of a Baylor team going down in the WCBB occurs that's not so good because we weren't expecting to be without that star power. Uh, yeah.
And to show that he has all the facts behind him, Duffy excitedly trots out the old numbers that show that men's first-round games in the last 6 years have a lot more upsets than the women's (how shocking and new), without quite remembering that all of these tournaments go 6 rounds. We can hopefully all concede that the lesser depth of the WCBB field makes the first round kind of pat (unless you're playing Ball State), but just how "painfully predictable" is the tourney for Duffy if he had instead looked at maybe the results for the Sweet 16 games, where the meat of the action starts to happen. Using the same kind of yardstick of defining an upset in the third round as being the definition for an upset (a #6 seed beating a #3 seed is an upset, a #5 seed winner does not really qualify as an upset), then the men have had 25 unpredictable underdogs and the women have had 20 between 2008-2013. So the presence of less than one more underdog a year in the Sweet 16 games makes the MCBB perfectly balanced with the right amount of craziness and tradition, while the women's tourney is painful and predictable? During the 5 previous years, a #1 seed has won both the men's and women's tournament 4 times, but I guess the men are much more wildly unpredictable because #3 seed UConn won the other tournament while the women only had that stolidly predictable #2 seed Texas A&M. Acknowledged, big difference between a #2 and #3.
Again, we know that the one-and-done has affected the MCBB's power structure in a way that some applaud and some deplore, but to praise the resulting "perfect balance" as such a great thing while saying that unpredictable results in WCBB almost never happen and are bad if they do is just a little too far down the slippery slope of illogical somersaults. So Griner is gone, that's tough. So are 9 of the 10 male players that ESPN cited as being the best in the country when March Madness began. So deal with it. There are plenty of BEastly good teams and players left to write stories about and hype to the max. No one wants a wet blanket at the Final Four.
Kevin Duffy of the CT Post jumped on the runaway nationwide band wagon of articles about how feeble the WCBB tournament is now that the Baylor-Griner-Sims juggernaut has gone bye-bye. The sadness of the sports broadcasting networks and writers is certainly understandable. At least half of the America that might have had an interest in the WCBB tournament have likely drifted away now that the name recognition and star glitter of Griner is gone, though if you read the boards it seems an unfair share of that interest was misogynistic. And a few writers that thought they could plump down on the couch and type out the "Baylor the Unbeatable" stories may have to actually do a few minutes of research about women's college basketball now to come up with an angle for an article, if they actually are still interested in covering the smudgy Louisville-Cal-ND-UConn slate of action. And admittedly, Duffy who covers the women Huskies fairly well is likely playing devil's advocate versus a discreet but noticeably big sigh of relief that was emitted into the Connecticut atmosphere after the Bears went down.
But of course this is not just about sadly waving farewell to the Griner money maker, this is also about putting out the usual trite tripe about the WCBB's supposedly substandard tourney. For Duffy it's the "painful predictability" of the WCBB tournament where " any unexpected result could be viewed as a positive." Thanks Kev, at least it's not all totally negative. And after bemoaning the loss of Griner shine as likely not being so great for the game (okay, that's fine), he goes off on the usual spiel about how the MCBB with all of it's one-and-done and constant frenzy of upsets that knock star teams and star players out of the tournament has just the right balance to excite the viewers. In the MCBB the overwhelming favorite doesn't necessarily win unlike in the WCBB so that's great and exciting, except that when the aberration of a Baylor team going down in the WCBB occurs that's not so good because we weren't expecting to be without that star power. Uh, yeah.
And to show that he has all the facts behind him, Duffy excitedly trots out the old numbers that show that men's first-round games in the last 6 years have a lot more upsets than the women's (how shocking and new), without quite remembering that all of these tournaments go 6 rounds. We can hopefully all concede that the lesser depth of the WCBB field makes the first round kind of pat (unless you're playing Ball State), but just how "painfully predictable" is the tourney for Duffy if he had instead looked at maybe the results for the Sweet 16 games, where the meat of the action starts to happen. Using the same kind of yardstick of defining an upset in the third round as being the definition for an upset (a #6 seed beating a #3 seed is an upset, a #5 seed winner does not really qualify as an upset), then the men have had 25 unpredictable underdogs and the women have had 20 between 2008-2013. So the presence of less than one more underdog a year in the Sweet 16 games makes the MCBB perfectly balanced with the right amount of craziness and tradition, while the women's tourney is painful and predictable? During the 5 previous years, a #1 seed has won both the men's and women's tournament 4 times, but I guess the men are much more wildly unpredictable because #3 seed UConn won the other tournament while the women only had that stolidly predictable #2 seed Texas A&M. Acknowledged, big difference between a #2 and #3.
Again, we know that the one-and-done has affected the MCBB's power structure in a way that some applaud and some deplore, but to praise the resulting "perfect balance" as such a great thing while saying that unpredictable results in WCBB almost never happen and are bad if they do is just a little too far down the slippery slope of illogical somersaults. So Griner is gone, that's tough. So are 9 of the 10 male players that ESPN cited as being the best in the country when March Madness began. So deal with it. There are plenty of BEastly good teams and players left to write stories about and hype to the max. No one wants a wet blanket at the Final Four.
