The WNBA, for one of the first times in its history, has a good thing going. The league long famous for never turning a profit is nearly doubling its revenues from four years ago, its growth outpacing inflation fivefold. This is a good trend. This is a trend towards demand-meeting professional women’s basketball in the United States.
Still, it’s unclear if the WNBA is as popular as women’s college basketball, with eleven times as many viewers tuning in to watch Caitlin Clark face LSU in this year’s national championship as watched the most watched game of last year’s WNBA playoffs. There was a Caitlin Clark boost here, but even if you compare 2022 to 2022, more than five times as many people watched the most watched college game as watched the most watched pro game. College basketball does have a format advantage—the most watched men’s college game comfortably edged the most watched NBA game of the season yet again this year—but the magnitude is off. In men’s hoops this year, the most watched college game beat the most watched pro game by 12%. In women’s hoops in 2022, that number was 539%. No matter how the total revenue and interest numbers compare, it’s undeniable that women’s college basketball has proven a greater capacity to capture interest than the WNBA.
This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and with the WNBA growing—possibly due to its surging feeder college game—I’m not going to recommend many changes. But looking back at the league’s history, it’s easy to play what-if, and today’s what-if is:
What if the WNBA had more directly attached to the men’s game?
The WNBA and the NBA are different. They have different teams, they have mostly different owners, they play on entirely different calendars. Contrarily, men’s and women’s college basketball are carbon copies of one another—same teams, same format, same schedule.
I’m not theorizing that women’s college basketball became as popular as it is by imitating the men’s game. I don’t think the recipe for women’s sports is to directly imitate men’s sports. I’m theorizing that women’s college basketball became popular because it 1) capitalized on existing fanhoods, seamlessly catering to natural allegiances rather than needing to build a following from scratch and 2) meshed naturally with the most popular basketball event of the year, sandwiching its semifinals and championship into the weekend where basketball’s media attention is near its peak.
The WNBA’s design initially followed some of this model. The original eight teams were each affiliated with an NBA franchise. But with different nicknames and a different schedule, natural allegiances were made less natural. It’s not that the WNBA should have named the Fever the ‘Lady Pacers.’ It’s that the NBA should have perhaps approached the WNBA by creating women’s offshoots of NBA teams. In college basketball at the University of Iowa, both the men’s and women’s teams are named the Hawkeyes. In English soccer, Arsenal has both a men’s and a women’s team. There’s no Newtonian law saying the leagues couldn’t have had both men’s and women’s Indiana Pacers. Maybe the potential backlash wasn’t worth the risk, but backlash tends to die down, and the alternative was evidently two and a half decades of lost money and lost opportunity to grow closer to the WNBA’s ultimate societal purpose—creating good professional women’s sports.
Changes in scheduling, similarly, could probably help. Initially, the WNBA played a summer schedule to capitalize on a void in the American sporting calendar, opting to compete in July and August with Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer rather than going head-to-head with the NHL and college basketball and the NBA itself. This may have been a necessary choice to get games on TV, but there’s a reason there’s so much TV space available in July: Americans don’t watch as much television in the summer. Whether it’s sports or sitcoms, the television is traditionally less a part of American life during vacation season, when the kids are home from school, than it is in the fall, winter, and spring. 26 years later, the schedule has thoroughly lost the plot, the league expanding its calendar enough that the playoffs now go head-to-head against football, the ratings equivalent of fighting a land war in Asia.
By now, the affiliation thing is probably impossible to change, and if there were perceived benefits from running the WNBA this independently of the NBA, they’re probably closer to realization now than they were in 1997. The schedule piece is more possible to adjust. It would be difficult, but pushing the season to one that runs from January to June would allow the WNBA to at the very least sandwich its Finals between NBA games, showing down with the Stanley Cup Finals in the worst case scenario and only baseball in the best case. This would be complicated—players couldn’t go spend the winter making money in Europe, and it would have to be planned far in advance to grab TV slots—but streaming removes a lot of TV limits, and if the WNBA wants its Caitlin Clark moment, it’s not going to happen even one day before the Bears play the Browns on a Thursday night.
Again, the WNBA has a good thing going right now. It’s hard to imagine it won’t be profitable soon at that growth rate if it isn’t profitable already. The growing women’s college game should only help the league when it comes to star power, and gambling is a powerful interest generator. But the longer one sits with the existence of a subsidized yet botched sports league, the more one fears its creation by the NBA was performative all along, and the more one wonders what the league should have done differently, as well as what it still can.
Speaking of Caitlin Clark…
ESPN announced the ESPY finalists today, and Brock Purdy is among the finalists for Best Breakthrough Athlete. Also among them? Caitlin Clark.
It’s an Iowa State vs. Iowa showdown on the biggest (physical) stage in sports, and I’m not sure how to handicap it. On the one hand, Caitlin Clark is and was a huge deal nationally this academic year. On the other, the NFL is king. Thankfully, the other two finalists in this category—Julio Rodríguez and Angel Reese—are looking like also-rans, Rodríguez because he plays baseball and plays it in Seattle and Reese because Jill Biden already said out loud whom we’d remember from this women’s college basketball season.
Something to keep an eye on.
The Cubs Are Also Winning
It’s a little nice to have the Cubs under the radar, since expectations can get so far ahead of reason with this team, but while the Reds and to a lesser extent the Giants dominate the headlines with their winning streaks, the Cubs have been playing just as well over just about the same time span. Since June 9th, the Reds are 11–1, the Cubs are 10–2, and the Giants are 9–2 with a game left to be played tonight. The Reds and Giants are higher in the standings now, but with the Reds that’s especially marginal, and the Reds have to play the best team in baseball this weekend while the Cubs get to mess around in London against the Cardinals. The median weekend projection has the North Siders heading back to the States only two games back in the loss column.
The London trip is concerning, and Dansby Swanson’s swollen wrist is concerning, and the fact this is still a sub-.500 roster is still concerning. But the situation is what the situation is, and the Cubs are right there with Cincinnati in the NL Central race. The Brewers are still the favorites. The Cubs’ playoff chance is still only about one in five. But if the Cubs can win or split their remaining series before the All-Star Break, they’ll enter it a game above .500. That’s unlikely, but it’s within reach, and one game above .500 might just be enough to win this division.
As far as last night and today went: Marcus Stroman just keeps doing it and Kyle Hendricks is putting up results we haven’t seen from him in years. His FIP is below 4.00, his xERA is concerning but not as bad as it was the last two years, and he’s added stability to a rotation that desperately needed it. The Cubs still don’t have the roster of a title contender, but the goal for this year isn’t winning a World Series. It’s to be competitive enough to not prompt a premature, overreaction-driven overhaul which could set back what’s looking like a productive rebuild on paper.
Things have been good with the Cubs.
I’ll knock on wood now.
Josh Berry’s Moment Comes
With Kevin Harvick retiring after this season, the Number 4 Ford at Stewart-Haas Racing has had a looming open seat. Today, the team announced that Josh Berry would be filling it. They also announced what kind of guy wouldn’t be filling it:
Berry, who’ll be 33 years old by the time next season starts, was a bank teller and community college student back in 2008 when Dale Earnhardt Jr. came across him in an online simulator racing league. Berry asked Earnhardt if he could show the NASCAR veteran footage from his own Legends car races in Nashville. Earnhardt obliged. Earnhardt was impressed. Two years later, Berry was in North Carolina, living with Earnhardt’s mother and working at the JR Motorsports shop while he raced late models for the team.
Josh Berry raced late models for Earnhardt for ten years.
After years of one-off races as a substitute across various national series, Earnhardt managed to get Berry into the JR Motorsports Number 8 in the Xfinity Series for twelve races in 2021, filling out the schedule for Sam Mayer, who was too young to run a full season. In the sixth of those races, Berry won at Martinsville. It was a win that changed a lot of things for the short track driver, now a veteran himself. The strong results kept coming, and a pair of Cup Series fill-in opportunities came with them, and by the end of the summer Berry had been announced as the full-time driver in the Xfinity Number 8 car for the following year.
He nearly won the championship.
Now in his second full-time year in Xfinity racing, NASCAR’s second-highest level, Berry is running fifth in the standings while also having run eight Cup races for Hendrick Motorsports, five for an injured Chase Elliott and three for an injured Alex Bowman. Next year, he’ll be in the Cup Series full time, driving a car that at times in the last five years has been the best in the sport.
It’s a great accomplishment for Berry, and it’s a great accomplishment for Earnhardt as a coach of sorts, and it’s a great moment for NASCAR, which has struggled in recent years with the motorsports curse of being a rich kid’s sport. It’s not my impression that Josh Berry grew up poor or anything, and he certainly needed resources to get into those Legends cars back in Tennessee, but a driver being able to perform and network their way from iRacing on a simulator to manning one of the best rides in the sport is a much better situation than pay-to-play. Ideally, access would be even better (even cynics should agree that you get more talent if you draw from a greater pool), but it’s a great outcome for NASCAR institutionally, and it’s a strong testament to Earnhardt and Stewart’s respective care for the sport.
NASCAR is better today than it was yesterday.
And it’s going to be even better when we get to Daytona.
