Thriving women’s sports sold short by realignment
College volleyball took another leap last weekend, and the context is important. Instead of shying away from direct competition with the most unstoppable TV viewership behemoth in the western hemisphere, it challenged the NFL head-on.
On a Sunday afternoon, an up-and-coming sport essentially declared it didn’t need to back down to almighty football in order to thrive.
And it was right. When 1.69 million viewers tuned in to ABC to watch Texas win its second consecutive national championship with a three-set sweep of topranked Nebraska, it marked the largest college volleyball audience in history. It drew almost as many viewers as the highest-rated NBA and men’s college basketball games of the week, and it outdrew all but one of the first eight bowl games of the college football season.
It didn’t even put a dent in the NFL’s gargantuan ratings, but that’s not the point.
The point is that power brokers probably underestimate the value of the sports audience beyond those who care about football.
One wonders if the people in charge of college sports will realize this before it’s too late.
Right now, the appeal and the potential of women’s college sports is undeniable. A record crowd of 92,003 turned out for a volleyball match at Nebraska’s football stadium in August. Last spring’s NCAA softball title game at the Women’s College World Series averaged 1.9 million viewers.
The most popular player in all of college basketball is Iowa guard Caitlin Clark, and it’s not particularly close. Last April, an average of 9.9 million viewers watched Clark’s Hawkeyes lose to LSU in the championship game, not far off from the 13.1 million who watched the clincher of the NBA Finals a couple of months later. So what’s the problem? The problem is that because the soaring budgets in athletic departments across the country are driven primarily by the billions of dollars in college football, the growth of these other sports is being undermined just as they’re proving their own worth.
The latest wave of conference realignment that has put Oregon and Washington in the same league as Rutgers, and Stanford in the same league as Clemson, and BYU in the same league as Oklahoma State and Central Florida? All of that might make at least a tiny bit of sense if it were limited to football.
But for the athletic teams that play two and three games per week? It’s asinine, and even football coaches see it.
Last week, UCLA’s Chip Kelly took some time to point out the obvious. At his school, the softball team is nothing short of a powerhouse. Over the past 25 years, the Bruins have made the Women’s College World Series 17 times, winning four national titles in the process. Throughout that time, they’ve had a fierce rivalry with Arizona, another elite Pac-12 program.
Starting next year, though, the Bruins will play in the Big Ten, while the Wildcats will be members of the Big 12. To Kelly, that doesn’t make any sense.
“Our softball team should be playing Arizona in softball,” Kelly told reporters. “Our basketball team should be playing Arizona in basketball. But because football left…”
He didn’t have to finish the thought. Because moving to the Big Ten was a lucrative deal for football, and because football still pays most of athletic departments’ bills, programs like softball and basketball and volleyball have to go along for the ride, even if it hurts them.
The perennially accomplished Stanford women’s basketball team, for instance, can’t possibly be expected to benefit from traveling across the country for almost half of its conference games every season. The massive TV deals that prompted realignment had nothing to do with any sport other than football.
So Kelly asked an important question: Why didn’t those conferences realign just for football, and leave everything else alone?
“I think we all should be independent in football,” Kelly said. “You could have a 64-team conference in the Power 5, and you could have a 64-team conference in the Group of 5, and we separate and play each other.”
Even if it’s not as simple as Kelly makes it sound, and even if there are all sorts of potential contractual hang-ups that could prevent it from happening, wouldn’t it be great if those in charge could figure it out?
As sports like volleyball and softball keep making leaps, there’s no reason to make progress more difficult. And if the assumption is that everyone should just back down to football, no matter what?
Last Sunday afternoon, 1.69 million people proved the wisdom in doing the opposite.