Man, what a week in women’s basketball. After what’s felt like multiple months of building anticipation, NCAA conference play arrived and immediately lived up to the billing. For the last two weeks, we’ve been treated to AP Top 10 matchups chock full of narratives and exciting performances. Interestingly enough, there’s also been enough mental mistakes across every game that makes one question the wisdom of walking away from high-level non-con matchups. But that’s a story for another day.

All you really need to be focusing on now is the fact that we are starting to see the shape of conference races and March Madness resumes take shape. There’s plenty to think ponder from this past week in women’s basketball, from Unrivaled to the WNBA to college hoops. So let’s dive into all of it.

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Jeff Walz really is my Roman Empire. I think about this man and his Louisville teams constantly and for no reason. It’s felt as though the idea of Walz as the Walter White of the women’s basketball world — constantly on the edge of being found out and defeated for good but always managing to find a way to remain on top — had calcified into the Louisville head coach becoming something of an escape artist. There was a run, after all, of nearly a decade in which Walz-coached teams were never leaving March Madness any earlier than the Elite Eight. But recently, it felt as though the transfer portal, NIL and the demands of a new type of athlete had hamstrung the longtime Cardinals leader.

But Walter White never quite stays down, does he?

Like Heisenberg turning the tables on Gus Fring and asserting himself as the Kingpin of the Southwest, Walz has managed to take a precarious position and make it work for he and his team. The Cardinals are currently the top team in the ACC, undefeated in league play so far with wins over Notre Dame, NC State and North Carolina. Their only three losses are to UConn, Kentucky and a two point defeat to South Carolina that was something of a coin-flip result.

What’s remarkable is that this Louisville team takes turns in terms of who is going to explode each night. Imari Berry came off the bench and poured in 33 on Sunday’s win over NC State. Other times, it may be Tajianna Roberts or Laura Ziegler or Elif Istanbulluoglu that lead the Cardinals. The ball gets shared and the hot hand feasts, all while they manage to execute late and win against top teams all over the country. Does it mean that Louisville is suddenly a Final Four contender? Not in the slightest. But what it does mean is that Jeff Walz has finally seemed to figure out how to operate in a new world of women’s college basketball. His tactical acumen was never in question as much as how he would be able to deal with this new frontier. Like other coaches before him, clearly Walz has understood what he needs to be and Louisville is right back on top as a result.

I said last week that Vic Schaefer’s behavior after the Longhorns loss against LSU was unbecoming for a coach and program that have national championship pedigree and aspirations. Something about it just seemed…rather JV for a guy that has been to national championship games and carries the same goals for this group. A couple days later, the Texas head coach invoked Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich as he acknowledged but didn’t walk back his allusions to a ‘scheduling vendetta’ on the part of the SEC towards his team.

To his credit, Schaefer didn’t hide any of that when the time came to face the music on Thursday. It would’ve been easy to draw attention to the fact that the Longhorns are shorthanded and already missing some of the key rotational pieces that helped fuel their red-hot run to open the season. He could’ve once again brought up scheduling or a call he didn’t like during the game that stalled his team out. But instead, Schaefer put the loss on himself and preached accountability with the rest of the SEC schedule lying ahead.

I’m not here to say that I want coaches like Vic to be curated and always on their p’s and q’s. That doesn’t make the job of a columnist very fun at all. But I am interested in how he chooses to employ what I like to call ‘strategic BS’ the rest of the season after this last week of dialogue around him and his program. For those that need a quick explainer, ‘strategic BS’ is my personal shorthand for the type of ‘no one believes in us even though we’re a juggernaut with elite players and a bottomless well of NIL money’ chicanery that SEC football coaches typically engage in. It’s that kind of hokey obfuscation where everyone with a pulse can see that the commentary is just blustery motivation but, against all odds, it works inside the team building.

A loss like this is exactly the kind of game that can be used as the bedrock of ‘strategic BS’. Dawn Staley was able to turn an early season loss against UCLA last year into a ‘No One Believed In Us’ campaign that lasted all the way until the 2025 national championship game.

Will those checks still cash after you expended some of your social capital by calling out your own conference for a tough back-to-back? I guess we’ll find out. But if there were ever a time for Vic to lean on the underdog narrative that so wonderfully worked in his final four years in Mississippi State, it’s now. And while Texas isn’t the type of program where you’re just a ‘little ole’ team against the big dogs’, there is a challenge that Schaefer could stand to embrace in Austin. The program hasn’t won a title in 40 years and is not yet considered a blue blood nationwide. Whether he knows it or not, there is still some ‘underdog’ in this Longhorn team and it should be welcomed instead of being seen as another hindrance or vendetta.

Few NCAA teams have completely unraveled in conference play so far the way Iowa State has. After a 14-0 start to the year punctuated with a win over No. 11 Iowa, Cyclone star Addy Brown got hurt and the wheels promptly fell off the bus. ISU dropped their first game of the year to Baylor and then inexplicably were upset by Big 12 cellar dweller Cincinnati. Pile on two more losses to West Virginia and Colorado and finish that off with a blowout defeat to Oklahoma State on Sunday and you have a team in disarray.

While coaches and players might tell you it’s reductive to put all of the tumult on one player’s absence, it’s hard to not look at Iowa State and think that’s exactly what’s happening. Without Brown to help Audi Crooks in the frontcourt, teams are simply stacking the paint and making it hard for ISU’s superstar center to even get a touch inside. While Arizona transfer Jada Williams was a huge addition to the team as a distributor and true point guard, she’s never been a high-volume, high-efficiency shooter.

In essence, there’s a big gaping offensive hole on the floor that hasn’t been easily filled yet. I’m surprised we have waited this long to see Evangelina Paulk, the Wofford transfer and former SoCon Player (and Defensive Player) of the Year, to get legitimate minutes for Iowa State and it wouldn’t surprise me if maybe she got a few more as they await Brown’s return. But, beyond the issue of that one injury, we’re seeing an all-too-familiar story emerge in Ames this year. Audi Crooks is a fantastic player and the focal point of everything this team does. Is it going to be enough to even make the NCAA Tournament, let alone contend for a Big 12 title? Head coach Bill Fennelly has won a lot at Iowa State but potentially missing a deep tournament run with a player of Crooks’ caliber would be a travesty. Brown’s injury is still considered ‘indefinite’ for now and, unless they find a replacement for her scoring and attention from opposing defenses, it could be a long rest of the season for the Cyclones.

In a lot of ways, Unrivaled is a positive achievement of a sports league putting players and their wants/needs first. From the contracts, which pay well and are mixed in with equity stakes in the league, to the facilities and scheduling, the 3×3 venture has been met with nothing but praise from its labor force.

But what about everyone else?

The early TV viewership returns have concerned enough people that league executive Alex Bazzell had to get out in front of a microphone this past week to effectively tell people that Rome wasn’t built in a day. There have been debates over whether or not 3×3 basketball, in this modified format to boot, is interesting enough for casual fans to want to watch. All of these things would be worthwhile conversations if not for the fact that it’s all happening against the backdrop of the WNBA’s ongoing labor negotiations. Every negative metric for Unrivaled is seen as a feather in the cap of ownership and management’s bargaining position in the other league. And while there is some reasonable worry about the idea of how to manage the inevitable plateau that comes after a meteoric short-term surge of popularity, it’s all playing into the hands of bad-faith actors who have existed on the periphery of women’s sports since before Title IX was signed into law.

The issue that I see is less about the one-time numbers and more about the long-term issue of storytelling in the league. Unrivaled, as I mentioned, has given players everything they’ve wanted including a relationship to the media that is more on their terms. While fans of individual players have probably gotten new, unfiltered and more behind-the-scenes access to their favorite figures, there is a pattern emerging that other sports leagues (particularly the NWSL and WNBA) would do well to monitor.

Like it or not, a key source of revenue for these leagues (and their labor force, by extension) lies in TV rights money. Nobody is making what they do if Comcast/NBC, FOX, Paramount/CBS, Disney/ESPN, Netflix, Amazon and others don’t pay billions of dollars to televise the product. And, for reasons we still can’t understand just yet, there isn’t a tried and true method for taking social media hype and translating that to linear TV. In short, the casuals that are comprising a lot of viewership just aren’t on social media the same way a lot of other people are. So, if you’re Unrivaled, you have a direct line in to millions of people that are fine ingesting your player-driven content in six second snippets. That’s awesome for building hype and energy that translates into sponsors, strategic partnerships and interest that can help expand and grow the league.

But the money that you need to keep everything sustained, the sweet crude oil that is broadcast TV deals, are what keeps you from being seen as a one-hit-wonder or, even worse, a minor league product that networks throw on their channels just to fill up their day-to-day windows. How do you build that up?

Simple. Traditional sports media.

Whether athletes like it or not, there is a give-and-take with a lot of this stuff. The equity that exists within sports that doesn’t in other labor-based industries like acting or music is a direct result of a well-resourced media apparatus that runs parallel to the industry itself. The games are played, we talk about the game, more people get interested in the game, more people watch the game, we talk about it more, and on and on the cycle goes. Beyond the stories of coaches, from the up-and-comers to the former WNBA leaders, what is happening on-the-floor that is keeping a casual interested? Is social content that speaks to individual player fanbases enough to sustain high level viewership that funds a league in the long term?

Think about the biggest storylines that have come out of Unrivaled in the first week. It’s not about anything actually happening in the run of play. Some of that is on journalists and forcing media outlets to work a little harder in finding good stories. But if the bedrock of your media strategy centers around what players want, you may be in for a tough time. While there’s a balance here of media not taking themselves to seriously and treating athletes with the necessary respect, it does feel as though sports leagues feel they’ve advanced past needing a ‘talk circuit’ around them and that going direct to their fans is going to work.

In that respect, consider Unrivaled the first real stress test for that kind of philosophy.

Typically, when I write about labor issues within women’s basketball, I’ve thought of Americans generally as a management-adjacent class. There’s that joke that we are all ‘temporarily embarrassed billionaires’ and that our drug of choice — being told that we too could make a ton of money and be on top of the food chain one day — stops us from seeing the obvious worker solidarity that would solve a lot of inequalities in the world.

But lately, with everything going on, I’ve found that Americans aren’t actually addicted to the boot of a master. We crave the equity that would put everyone on equal footing, but we want it done in an orderly fashion. We, as a people, are addicted to order and will fight tooth and nail to avoid the perceived chaos the rest of the world deals with on a day-to-day basis.

It’s through that lens that we can effectively examine the subtle shift in tone with regard to the WNBA’s ongoing labor fight. With Unrivaled’s TV numbers and league viability now becoming something of a proxy war between the WNBPA and WNBA, there’s been a small but noticeable uptick of ‘this has gone on long enough’ type rhetoric being lodged towards the players instead of the league. While the bad faith actors have always been there, lurking in the shadows to lodge a misogynistic bomb towards a diverse coalition of women who simply want to receive fair compensation for the labor they provide, it’s been interesting to see who is starting to flip their commentary towards the league as the reality of a work stoppage becomes more and more probable.

This is the climax of every labor fight as well as the hardest hump for players to get over: the chaos of uncertainty.

What does happen in the event of a work stoppage? Natasha Cloud was on the Be Great Academy podcast and alluded to the fact that Unrivaled could simply just expand to a year-round product. Whether that means they would expand to 5×5 and simply absorb the WNBA’s function (which I personally think would be a good endgame to get the NBA out of the picture entirely) or remain 3×3 with the group they have now (which I personally think would be a death knell for women’s pro basketball in the U.S. for the next decade at minimum) is anyone’s guess. And that’s what people are going to start reacting to sooner rather than later.

We are a comfortable country of comfortable people. It’s why citizens in Minneapolis, going out to simply stop what is functionally a secret police from black bagging their neighbors with no due process, are labeled ‘protestors’ on cable TV. The binary we exist in is order vs. chaos, at least that’s what we’ve always been sold. Over the next few months, expect that to be the WNBA’s pivot and watch how quickly other media, former players and luminaries in the space react in kind. But what the PA is fighting for is short-term uncertainty for long-term stability and viability for as many people as possible.

Sometimes it’s easy to not see the forest through the trees, and until a new CBA gets done, the WNBA and its owner class will rely on people to do exactly that.