The New Yorker Radio Hour - March Madness 2024: College Basketball at a Crossroads

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

As this year’s annual March Madness tournament kicks off, there’s a sense of malaise around men’s college basketball. The advent of the transfer portal is partly to blame, and the trend of top talents departing for the N.B.A. after just one year of college play. “There hasn’t been that kind of charismatic superstar like Zion Williamson at Duke,” Louisa Thomas tells David Remnick, “the big school and the big player, which is the perfect match.” But women’s college basketball is another story. Last year, superstars like Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark helped the sport reach its highest ratings ever for a final. Clark, in particular, with a penchant for nearly forty-foot throws that almost defies belief, has become such a source of fascination for fans that Remnick compares her to LeBron James. “The question is whether or not she can carry that attention with her” into the W.N.B.A. and to the league’s benefit, Thomas wonders, and  if “she can leave some of that attention behind. To what extent is this a unique phenomenon around a unique player?” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and it is that time of year again, March Madness, when at least for a month, college basketball is the thing in sports. It's inescapable. It's Butler with two seconds. He's got to put it up. The men's game is changing in ways that have been controversial for fans and some disappointing, and I'm thinking about the advent of the transfer portal, and the one-and-done still. for student athletes. It ain't what it used to be.

It ain't what I hope it returns to. And I'm not saying I don't want kids to have the same freedom as coaches or sports writers or anybody to move in the... I'm not saying that. All I'm saying is the product ain't that good right now. Meanwhile, women's college basketball has emerged as an increasingly electrifying force

on the sports scene. It's drawing record ratings. And right now, Caitlin Clark of the Iowa Hawkeyes, is as well known to fans in the game as LeBron James. And that's not something I would have foreseen in my early days as a sports writer. So I sat down the other day with the New Yorker sports writer, Louisa Thomas. What, in God's name, has happened to men's college basketball, it used to be a very exciting thing.

March would come around, and there would be a pool in every workplace in America, and people would have all kinds of opinions, and there were established stars, and all the rest. And now, I got to say, not so much. I want to note that you just did something that a year ago, two years ago would have been completely unheard of. You qualified college basketball as men's college basketball. Fair enough.

Yeah, I mean, men's college basketball is still very big. And CBS will be paying hundreds of millions of dollars for the honor of airing it. Last year, you know, more than 12 million people watched the finals. That was a record low. more than 9 million people watch the women's final. That was a record high. 12 million is still more than 9 million. You know, let's not get like way too carried away.

But it's true. You know, part of that has to do with the turnover in college basketball because the best players leave for the NBA very early. And there hasn't been a kind of charismatic superstar like, you know, Zion Williamson at Duke where the sort of the big school and the big player were just the perfect match and kind of attracted all this dynamic attention. Part of it is there is a kind of just excitement about the newness of the women's game

that has people talking. And it's not just Caitlin Clark. It's Angel Reese at LSU. It's the coaches. You know, Kim Mulkey is a huge figure. Coach Mulkey, 10 minutes to get to a final four. What do you tell your team to get there now? Make three throws and layups.

If I was watching this game, I'd turn it off. Look at that score, would you? That's some bad offensive basketball. Might be something to these balls being too bouncy, but that's some bad ball. Make your layups, make you free throws. Play hard for 10 minutes and see what happens. All right, thanks, coach. Don Staley is like a huge figure.

Do you know, Oriama is a huge figure. And the men's coaches are kind of like they're yesterday's, you know, superheroes. Yeah, it's like Rick Bettino whining at press conferences. Exactly. We've seen that before. We saw that a decade ago. You know, his scandals are old. They're stale, you know.

Yeah, he doesn't even throw a chair across the court. Exactly. Yeah. What kind of shit fit is that? Exactly. You can't hold a candle to one of Kim Mulkey's sequent outfits, you know? There you go. So I think that's part of it, too.

They're just these kind of great dynamic characters and budding rivalries and a sort of sense of freshness to the whole thing. And it makes no sense in the men's game. If you're a star in your freshman year or sophomore year, it makes absolutely no sense to play in your junior and senior year for economic reasons. Why would you risk a career-ending injury? in your junior year or senior year, and then be forced to make a living like a normal human being as opposed to someone who could quite possibly make a fortune as a pro basketball player.

It might not even make sense to go to college at all. You could go to the G League. You could go to Europe, you know, great. MVPs are coming out of Europe these days. Now there is an argument that with the NIL money, name, image, and likeness money, you can get sponsorships, you can get millions of dollars, even if you are playing college basketball.

And the best college basketball player in the country, Zach Eadie, who plays for Purdue, is making a lot of money. And that has, you know, he's not a freshman. And that's part of a reason why. But still, I think you're right. There's just not a great reason to stick around for four years unless you just really love the college experience. One other question about the men's game, although this may spread everywhere. It was amazing to me when I saw my, you know, news alerts the other day that the Dartmouth men's basketball team, the Dartmouth, men's basketball team, unionized.

This is not, let me, in older respect to Dartmouth, this is not a good basketball team. This is not a basketball team that its players are making a fortune or that there's a fortune to share. Right. How did this happen? Why Dartmouth and what is it going to lead to?

That's a huge question, a good question. And the NCAA would like to know very much the answer. Thank you. Dartmouth is writing a very kind of like carefully worded statement about how it really respects unions. And it's very happy that has all these unions. However, it's student athletes or students first. And therefore, this is an academic enterprise. And they are not athletes at all think, I mean, kind of.

So Dartmouth is resisting this effort. I mean, they're expected to appeal. I don't actually know if they've appealed yet. I'm speaking with the New Yorkers, Louisa Thomas. More in a moment. All right, let's get to the subject that we really want to talk about. I'm watching these games, and I'm watching these highlights on SportsCenter in the morning of Caitlin Clark. It's not that she's good.

It's not that she's great. She's insane. She dribbles down the court, and she stops at the logo, 40 feet away. And it's not like it's the end of the quarter or the end of the half. She's just pulling up and dumping them in. from 40 feet. What is going on? Just like the coach drew up the play, right? Oh my God. It's insane. I actually turned on an I-O game earlier this season and I thought I was watching the highlights. Like I thought it was half-time and they were showing the highlights, but no, it was playing in real time.

It was just like one logo three after another. I mean, it was absolutely bananas. She is like just, she's got, you know, the whole old cliche, she's got ice in her veins. Like, I'm sorry, but she does. No, any other player, I can't think of any other player, including Pete Maravich, who didn't shoot threes because of when he played. But even Steph Curry doesn't shoot from 40 feet on a regular basis. Is it a case of unbelievable skill or radical impatience? I think that players know to crowd her as soon as she gets anywhere near the three-point line, which is one of the reasons why she is also the best passer on the country, loves. Well, she seems to look to pass. I mean, it sounds insane after what I just said, she also looks to pass first.

Phenomenal passer. She has such great court vision. So tell me a little bit about Caitlin Clark. Where does she come out of how did this player become herself? What letter to Iowa? Iowa letter to Iowa. She wants to stay home. She's from Iowa.

There is a statue of her in Butter at the Iowa County Fair or state fair. She is a pretty low-key person. She's declined most interview requests, including my own. own, but still hoping to change that. And she is, you know, she's very wealthy now because of these NIL deals. Do we know how wealthy and what those deals are like? I think she's, it's several million, I mean, it's Gatorade, it's Nike. They're big, big deals. And she's, you know, she's managed by Excel, which is one of the top basketball endorsement, you know, agencies in the world. So, or in the country, certainly. So, yeah, she's making a lot of money. And

And it's in the seven figures. What are her plans? She has declared for the WMBA draft. She will be the number one pick by the Indiana Fever. So she's going to stick around in the Midwest. But she could potentially change the landscape of women's sport. The question is whether or not she can carry that attention with her into the pros and also whether or not she can leave some of that attention behind.

Like to what extent is this a unique phenomenon around a unique player? And to what extent is this a something people are turning in and they're going to watch women's basketball now? Let's ask the uncomfortable question. She's certainly not the first phenomenal basketball player in the women's game. What role, if any, does race have to play with her popularity and the amount of attention she's getting? Oh, you can't ignore it. I mean, certainly there have been women's basketball, like men's basketball, is a predominantly black sport. and the stars are predominantly white historically.

I mean, and that's... In the women's game. In the women's game. And that does not mean that these women should don't deserve to be... I mean, Suebert is one of the great all-time players. You know, Diana Tarasi is the greatest ever. Like, just false stop. These women are great players in their own rate,

and I don't think anyone would dispute that. At the same time, like, it's disproportionate. The attention they get is, you know, it's startling to see how many of the game's biggest stars are white, given how many of the game's greatest players are black. And you can see some of the racial disparity. You know, it came in, it kind of came to the four last year during the finals when the LSU team, which was led by Angel Reese, who was a very outspokenly, you know, proud black woman,

was. And a phenomenal player. And a phenomenal player. And one of the best players in the country and still one of the best players in the country was criticized for sort of making these kind of taunting gestures that the Caitlin Clark had also made in. Katewell Clark was never criticized for the same thing. I mean, there's a racial element.

In other words, Angel Reese's gestures were racialized in the attention they got in the press. Exactly. And you just, you kind of can't ignore that. At the same time, I don't think there's any person who's, you yourself, a watcher. Like, you can't say that Caitlin Clark doesn't deserve the attention that she's got. No, she closed her heart out. She's extraordinary, as is Angel Reese. You also see it playing out now in that South Carolina is the best team in the

the country. And it's led by Don Staley, who is another outspoken black woman. And that team doesn't get the attention, you know, that it deserves and the respect that it deserves. It's undefeated, again, it's undefeated last year. Would have probably won the championship, if not for a very, very cold shooting night from outside and for Caitlin Clark herself. And, you know, this is a team that, yeah, it deserves more attention. And, you know, does race play a part? This is America, probably. Now, one amazing dimension to sports in general, but even college sports that has changed things, is the legalization of gambling. The legalization of gambling is just ubiquitous, as a matter of advertising, as a matter of activity. How has that changed the sport, if any?

How aware are the players of this dimension of their jobs? I mean, betting has been around for a long time. Legalized betting is relatively new, but when I was in fourth grade, I won 50 bucks on my mom's office, you know, but wait a minute, you won 50 bucks. That is seriously impressive. I know. Well, thank you. But yeah, just to say that, to say the gambling's been around, but it's in the billions of dollars. You know, I've seen estimates of last year, you know, this was an estimate of how many, how much money they thought people were going to pay, but it was like $15 billion or something. What's actually more unnerving to me than like a lot of people are placing bets, most of these bets that people are placing. are $20 bets in their office pool. With sort of more kind of unnerving to me and where I really see it is how much betting money is infiltrating the coverage of these games. Totally. Yeah.

I mean, it's just like... And it's talked about as part of the conversation of the sport. You watch an NFL game. You watch any game of anything. And it's just, you know, Shaquille O'Neal is telling Charles Barkley that he's got X dollars on the game and is he taking the under or the over. It's every moment in the game is sort of potential, you know, time to get a hit of money, I guess. All right. Let's try to help our gambling listeners. I know you're loath to make picks, but there are listeners out there struggling to fill out their brackets.

Are there any potential March Madness upsets or Cinderella, as you want to predict, at this early juncture? Who looks like a good shot at winning the NCAA title? Who's in the mix? On the women's side, I cannot go against South Carolina. They are just such a phenomenally good basketball team. On the men's side, I'm going to go with Yukon to repeat. Really? Yeah. Why not?

Really? They're kind of like a scrappy college basketball-y kind of thing. Will you be putting cash money on this? Absolutely not. I'm not insane. I think that'd be a conflict for a sports writer, right? Yeah. Well, no. Are you kidding? It's legal. All right. Well, I'm saving my money, not betting it on the college sport, waiting for the injuries to come clear on the Knicks. And then I'm all in on that.

All in on the next. Thank you so much. Bless you. You can find Louisa Thomas's writing at New Yorker.com on virtually every sport. And if you're hungry for more basketball knowledge, you'll want to check out Louise's terrific profile of Nicola Yokic. Probably the best player in the game right now. It's at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's the program for today.

Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbeth of Tuneiards with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily.

Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deckett. And we had additional help this week from Alicia Zuckerman and Jared Paul. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.