Happy Tuesday, folks! Apologies for the delayed release of Five Out this week. I turned 31 on Monday and the incomparably lovely woman our group affectionately refers to here as ‘No Cap Wife’ decided that she’d take me down to Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs for a day of, quite literally, touching grass. As someone that generally never has liked their birthday, there was something exceedingly simple about eating a bowl of chili for lunch and looking at the sun start to descend behind Pike’s Peak with the love of my life.

The five of us that comprise NCS frequently talk in our group chat about needing that perspective every now and then. It’s easy to fall into being terminally online — especially in women’s basketball where so much of the dialogue starts and ends there — and letting that be a gateway to an internet consumption habit that usually ends up being unhealthy. While it sounds almost contrived and overly saccharine given the current historical moments we’re living through every day, I do think that concept of touching grass, be it by yourself or with others in your life, is becoming more and more necessary. I recommend it to any and every one.

Now that we’ve done our pre-read mindfulness work, let’s get to the column!

We’re about two and a half weeks into the NCAA women’s basketball season and already a handful of players have showcased themselves. Some of these names you know: Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd, Olivia Miles, Lauren Betts, Joyce Edwards, to name a few. But every year, we also get a few players that play themselves into positions of prominence. While there’s still some sample data we need to get to see who is feasting on lesser competition and who really improved a ton this past offseason, I’ve got a few fast-risers for you to keep tabs on throughout the year…

Last week, I wrote about how those who weren’t around when UConn was the dominant force in women’s college basketball are about to see that world return. The Huskies have seemingly vaporized the two tournament-level teams (Louisville and Ohio State) on their early season non-con slate and look every bit like a program that can repeat as national champions. Yes, there’s Azzi Fudd and a lot of new talent in Kayleigh Heckel and Serah Williams but the big star of this entire show is Sarah Strong.

It’s kind of strange to think about it in this way but it’s actually been some time since the biggest star in women’s college basketball was a forward or center. Sure, we’ve had Napheesa Collier, Aaliyah Boston and Angel Reese in the time since but they’ve had to share the spotlight with a litany of guards that commanded a huge amount of attention. Even Wilson, who could be argued as the last frontcourt superstar that was considered head-and-shoulders better than anyone in women’s college basketball, was somewhat underdiscussed in college due to coverage equity issues within the sport as well as South Carolina’s brand not fully being established yet. So now you have to go back nearly a decade to Breanna Stewart, one of the greatest college athletes of all time in any sport.

That’s the track it feels like Sarah Strong is on right now. When she’s on the floor, UConn looks unbeatable. Strong is just a sophomore but is a force multiplier that already is a three level scorer and proficient passer with a knack for beating doubles and collapses on her in the paint. I sometimes worry about stepping into the hyperbolic but we’ve already seen her play a huge role in winning a national title as just a freshman. We tend to use ‘generational’ or ‘transcendent’ a bit too loosely in sports media these days, but Strong is one of the few players I’ve watched that live up to that billing and then some. Appreciate what you’re watching now because we may be watching something truly different.

Penn State are somewhere between punk rock and the Bad News Bears. Head coach Carolyn Kieger got caught up in an investigation last season into her team culture with allegations of her fostering a toxic environment coming to light. In spite of her winning just 73 games in six seasons, Penn State decided to keep her around and see if she could turn the ship around. Kieger hit the portal hard and added some extremely intriguing names including former Rutgers star Kiyomi McMiller. For those unaware of her lore, McMiller is a five star talent that was being managed out of high school by a former CEO of Floyd Mayweather’s promotions company. A very public spat with Rutgers head coach Coquese Washington led to a messy in-season split with many schools avoiding McMiller in the transfer portal entirely.

She ended up at Penn State who also grabbed some other players under kind of strange circumstances. Gracie Merkle had committed to Maryland before turning around merely a few days later and announcing a move to PSU. French star Tea Cleante joined the team late in the summer, a decision I’m told chafed some of her coaches of ASVEL (where Dominique Malonga played her French ball). On paper, this felt destined to fail and blow up in dramatic fashion. To be clear, it still could. But two weeks into the season, this gang of misfits at Penn State may end up being one of the most interesting stories in the sport. They’ve cruised to four wins with the trio of McMiller, Merkle and Cleante leading the way and now see Princeton this week in their first major test. At some point, I’ll write more about how this dynamic works but, for now, I’ll let the mystery of it guide my interest. Penn State is, for the first time in a long time, really intriguing and worth watching. I guess that has to count for something.

On Monday evening, Jonquel Jones announced her commitment to Project B, the new 5×5 league that is slated to play during the WNBA offseason. Her signing brings the total count up to three, as Jones joins Nneka Ogwumike and Alyssa Thomas as the first professional names affiliated with the startup. There were a lot of ways to interpret this but I couldn’t get by a nagging concern. Whether fair or not, all three of Project B’s players are individuals that have been associated with a lack of marketing or presence in the past. Jones had a 2022 ESPN cover story about the difficulties of being a masculine presenting Black lesbian and how living in her truth had affected her commercial opportunities. I wrote a cover on Alyssa Thomas this past summer about why it feels like she isn’t getting her just due as an all-time great player. As President of the Player’s Association, Ogwumike has plenty of quotes on record about the coverage disparities of the league and how that creates inequities from player to player.

Viewing it through that lens, I can see why an entity like Project B would be appealing to three athletes that feel they’ve been shortchanged by the system a bit. My concern is balancing that with some of what Project B Chief Basketball Officer Alana Beard had to say on Good Game with Sarah Spain this week. Maybe I’m just not one of the smart people and can’t see the genius of what Beard and the elder tech bros she represents but it doesn’t feel congruent when you say, “Our and belief is that it’s about the name on the back of the jersey” in response to a question about how you’ll build brand equity with women’s basketball fans and then go out and grab three players that have had legitimate trouble building their own brand equity.

So much of the interview was a mess of techspeak, entrepreneurial platitudes, contradictory worldviews and a smug withholding of much of the actual information people are wanting out of this league. Beard told Spain that titles never interested her and yet opened the interview clearly stating that her goal was always to be an owner. At multiple points, the listener is left to decipher if the former WNBA star-turned-Project B-executive is a willing mark or a true believer. There are places in which it clearly seems that Beard is doing all of this from a well-intentioned place of wanting to grow the game domestically and internationally. But then there’s other spots where she discusses this venture as a merging of sports and tech, even alluding to investors that ‘expect tech-like returns’ in the product. When pressed on that question by Spain, Beard kicked the answer to her two bosses — former Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice and former Meta VP of Sales Grady Burnett — who, naturally, probably wouldn’t answer it either.

Ultimately, you leave the interview with more questions than answers and more concerns than alleviations. Beard, for her part, comes off pretty terribly. At best, there’s a lot of things she isn’t aware of within her own league and, at worst, she’s running cover for tech people that have all the money in the world and absolutely no knowledge and understanding of how to build or maintain a sports league.

In a lot of ways, Beard is right. Maybe we’ve been focusing too much on the Saudi/Sela/PIF component of this when discussing the problems of Project B. What she may not realize is that be shining the light back on her Silicon Valley owners, she’s showing us exactly why this league and the people running it can’t be trusted as a viable long-term option for women’s basketball.

I was asked in a recent mailbag (consider becoming a Ball-Knower to be a part of them!) about whether or not we’d see Becky Hammon or Cheryl Reeve wander into the WNBA labor fray and whether or not their positions precluded them from doing so.

At that point, I was of the mindset that players saw most of their coaches as extensions of management and ownership. It doesn’t help that some coaches, like Reeve for instance, are executives as well as coaches. Hammon, although not explicitly the Aces current general manager, seems to be working in tandem with team President Nikki Fargas until a new one is hired. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense for them to speak out on behalf of the players when they aren’t a part of the union and also are in roles themselves that could be adversely affected by a more player-friendly collective bargaining agreement.

Which is why it was extremely surprising to hear Hammon tell CNBC Sport that the WNBA may need “a change in leadership.”

While the Aces coach said her interactions with league commissioner Cathy Engelbert had been limited, Hammon did infer that her communication and leadership style was not landing with the players. While there was an attempt to toe the party line — Hammon said that players were due for a huge salary increase but that it needed to be sustainable — it was surprising to hear one of the league’s best coaches confirming the players priors about their commissioner.

“When the players speak, people need to sit up and listen,” Hammon said. “I think [Engelbert is] sitting up and listening now.”

If anything, a very visible coach being the one to say this may be enough for the WNBA’s embattled leader to sit up and listen. While Project B has taken some of the air out of the player’s labor fight, the fact that Hammon is appearing to land on the side of the P.A. is a good sign that the factions aren’t fracturing internally just yet. And while that is the concern about too many alternate leagues picking at the carcass of a potential work stoppage, if it all becomes leverage that gets the W to stand down then I guess the ends may justify the means.