1. Dynasties Are Hard to Do
UConn plays this evening for its sixth championship in 26 years, a preposterous number within the current world of college basketball. A win would tie UConn with North Carolina for the third-most titles all time.
North Carolina is a modern program—not some school that dominated the 60s. North Carolina still took more than twice as long to get their six as UConn will have, should UConn win. To make it more impressive, UConn’s 26 years have been 26 years in which college basketball has risen to a new competitive height within itself. Fewer teams are consistently making Final Fours than used to in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, when things like UCLA’s win streak were still difficult, but more possible.
To be fair here, UConn hasn’t been as good over these last 26 years as a number of other programs have been. Two of its championships came via historically unprecedented runs. Two came thanks to individual serious upsets of Duke. These last two, should they win tonight, will have been the real dominance. These last two will have been UConn not only being the best team in the country—something Gonzaga has done more often than the Huskies—but winning the NCAA Tournament. This is when the real dynasty talk should begin. Iconic? Yes. UConn’s already there. UConn is one of college basketball’s seven most iconic programs (alongside UNC, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA, and Indiana). Tonight could be the opening of UConn’s first real dynasty, and college basketball’s first since Duke’s in the 90s.
Speaking of dynasties: How about South Carolina under Dawn Staley? There’s a lot more stratification in the women’s game than in the men’s. Upsets are rarer. Teams are more static at the top. Player turnover is slower because of the WNBA’s low salaries, and the sport just hasn’t gotten as competitively efficient as sports with longer histories. It’ll come. For now, Staley rules it, and while the stratification and staticness mean it’s easier to stay winning once a program’s at the top, they also make it a lot harder to climb that hill. Women’s basketball has a dynasty again. It’s South Carolina. As we exit the Caitlin Clark era and the sport continues to move into the mainstream, South Carolina’s the program carrying the banner.
2. How Much Better Caitlin Clark Made Iowa
We’ve been contrarian at times regarding Caitlin Clark, though not by any means to a malicious degree. We’ve rolled our eyes a bit at circumstances around some of the records she’s broken, and we’ve been slow to say she’s the best player ever. She might be the best offensive women’s basketball player of all time. She’s probably the most marketable women’s basketball player of all time. But how good was she as a college player?
Iowa didn’t come out of nowhere. C. Vivian Stringer coached at Iowa before coaching at Rutgers, making one Final Four there. Iowa had one of the two national players of the year in 2019, Megan Gustafson, whose career ended with a loss to Baylor in the Elite Eight. Still, Lisa Bluder had only made the second weekend twice in her 20 years at Iowa before Clark took the court as a freshman. Before this year, Iowa hadn’t been a 1-seed since the Stringer days. Now, they’ve made the national championship in back-to-back years, they’ve been a 2-seed or better in three straight tournaments, and they’ve made the second weekend three more times, bringing Bluder’s count to five while bringing the coach her first two trips to the Final Four.
What Clark did, then, is come in on the heels of another national player of the year and elevate the program from top-20 to top-5. In women’s basketball, that’s a big hill to climb. Caitlin Clark is far more than what she was as a college basketball player. But yes, she was really, really good.
3. Connecting the Calipari Dots
The John Calipari news is shocking. It is a really weird thing. There were paths this could have taken which would have added up. This is not one of them. The aspect where Arkansas received a few rejections before turning to Calipari might be the weirdest angle. Why didn’t they reach out faster? Also weird, though, is that Calipari didn’t leave Kentucky two weeks ago if he was ready to move on.
What these two things probably mean:
First, Arkansas might not think as highly of John Calipari as we might guess. Chris Beard and Jerome Tang might have really been higher choices for them. This seems outrageous, but I don’t think it’s the craziest thing in the world: The enticing thing about coaches with a smaller track record is that their upside is higher than those of known quantities. Calipari was producing very good teams at Kentucky. But Beard’s highest possible high might be higher than Calipari’s. I’m less personally convinced of that with Jerome Tang, but Arkansas may have seen it similarly.
An opposite explanation with this is that Arkansas was working on Calipari the whole time, and that Beard and Tang both “choosing” to stay put was about them backing down from a job they realized they weren’t likely to get (or, perhaps, Beard setting his own sights on Kentucky, though that’s looking like a little bit of a longshot right now for him). This one makes less sense to me. If Arkansas was working with Calipari behind closed doors this entire time, you’d think we would have only finally heard about it in a unified, cohesive group of statements. Instead, we got a steady swell of leaks yesterday until the news finally broke through the biggest leak of them all. I’ll have plenty to reading to do from the reporters on this, but it seems like it happened fast, over the last few days.
Second, Calipari probably really likes the Arkansas situation in particular. This was not an instance of him leaving Kentucky and then looking for another job. This was an instance of him leaving Kentucky to go to Arkansas. I don’t think that’s only because his buddy’s a booster.
So, exciting things on the horizon at Arkansas. I would imagine a lot of NBA players come out of there over the next few years. Exciting things at Kentucky, as well. The downside is scary but the upside at Kentucky will always be just about as high as it is anywhere in the country. The only thing working against Kentucky is location, and location is far from terrible for them. Kentucky is in the middle of everything. Also, it becomes less and less of an issue the higher-level your recruiting becomes, because your eye naturally has to turn in the national direction.
