Happy New Year, everyone!

Apologies to all of you for the radio silence from a content perspective. No Cap Wife and I took the plunge and moved from Denver, Colorado to Chattanooga, Tennessee and have been packing, driving and unpacking for the better part of a week and a half. There’s a bunch of reasons for deciding to take a couple years down in the River City but one thing you should be excited for is much more on-site coverage of women’s hoops!

Chatt’s location is just a few hours from a bunch of cities in SEC, ACC and even Big Ten country so if you were waiting for a reason to subscribe to either our free or paid newsletter, now’s the time. A note for everyone too: when you subscribe here on Beehiiv, you also get free access to our Discord chat as well as full access to our paid YouTube content as well (which will be ramping up substantially starting this week).

Now, onto a loaded column!

Is it just me or are coaches starting to get more and more whiny in a post-realignment world? I can understand being miffed about tampering or the transfer portal. That kind of thing is frustrating and has been proven to cause distractions and problems that have the potential to derail an otherwise positive season. But when it comes to schedules and seedings for the NCAA Tournament, my eyes immediately glaze over.

Following Texas’ loss to LSU on Sunday, Longhorns head coach Vic Schaefer got on the mic and all but accused the SEC of having “a vendetta” against his team by making them play the Tigers and South Carolina on the road in the span of four days. It was the kind of lame excuse-making that we typically see from the “It Means More” conference in football but, lately, it feels as though that fabricated persecution complex has come to women’s basketball as well. We’ve seen coaches complain about not being given a number one overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, the scheduling of games and difficulty of opponents as well as vapid justifications for blowing up high-level non-con games in favor of 15 matchups against schools that don’t even register on the NCAA’s NET rating list.

For Vic Schaefer, it’s unbecoming. Your team is the No. 2 ranked unit in the nation. You have the reigning SEC Player of the Year, return a huge chunk of your starters from last year’s Final Four team and are a national championship favorite. Embrace the gauntlet. Don’t run from it. It’s the same kind of manipulation of the narrative that Kim Mulkey has employed for the entirety of this non-conference run, justifying an abysmal early season slate by saying that the SEC is so hard it doesn’t make sense to add more tough games. That calculus blew up in the Tigers face in their first two major games of the year — losses to Kentucky and Vanderbilt — and, to LSU’s credit, they managed to adjust to grab a huge home win over the Longhorns.

I don’t have a problem with coaches speaking up when there is a legit problem. Within Vic’s commentary is a real point about the bloat of megaconferences and how it creates inequity within the system. Unfortunately for Schaefer, that falls on deaf ears when you are coaching for one of the two schools that engineered the most recent wave of conference consolidation.

It wasn’t scheduling that lost Texas this game. Missing critical rebounds in the third quarter and settling for early shot clock baseline jumpers while LSU attacked the rim is what did. While there’s a time and a place for him to make the point, doing it after this loss and before you see the one coach (Dawn Staley) who has had your number for years feels like narrative priming for a loss. And when you have championship aspirations, you can’t talk like this. Go out and win. That’s what it takes.

In my last column, I wrote that it was time to keep an eye on Krista Gerlich and her Texas Tech Red Raiders. For years, they’ve felt on the cusp of rebuilding into a regular NCAA Tournament entrant but, once Big 12 play started, TTU would wilt. Over and over and over again.

What a difference a year (and some NIL/Rev Share money) makes.

To be clear, I don’t expect the 18-0 Red Raiders to continue at this pace. Their win over then-No. 15 Baylor came without the Lady Bears star, Taliah Scott, on the floor for a vast majority of the game and their first few Big 12 wins have come against the bottom half of the conference. With that said, there’s definitely a world in which Texas Tech is 21-0 and 8-0 in league play by the time they face their gauntlet (Utah, Iowa State and TCU in the span of a week).

So, how do we judge Gerlich’s team right now? Can we even?

I think at this point it’s safe to say that this is absolutely an NCAA Tournament team especially if they manage to cross the 20 win threshold before January is done. Bailey Maupin has been the constant on this team, averaging double-digits for four years now in Lubbock but the emergence of Ole Miss guard transfer Snudda Collins is what has energized this team in new years. The duo, along with guard Jaylynn Bristow, have formed a nice tandem that managed to deal with West Virginia’s infamous press defense in Morgantown and notch a pair of SEC wins (Arkansas, Mississippi State) earlier this year.

A loss or two before they reach that three game stand at the end of January is acceptable but if you haven’t been watching Texas Tech, now is the time to get acquainted. If they manage to impress against the top of the Big 12, a bigger story (right here on No Cap Space WBB, no less!) will definitely be warranted.

This week, Luxury Tax returns. For those just joining us for the first time, Luxury Tax is our flagship interview show where we go beyond the basketball with some of the biggest names in the game or our favorite names that need a bit more press.

Richmond’s Maggie Doogan is one such player and she’ll be our feature this week.

While chatting with her, the topic of the A-10 came up and the fact that it is a rather underappreciated league within women’s basketball. Naturally, the league’s reigning Player of the Year agreed and said that more attention should be paid to the conference and more respect should be given by the NCAA Tournament selection committee. She couldn’t be more correct.

In college basketball, I’d argue that there are four power conferences that a casual fan can identify: The SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12. On the men’s side, the Big East is considered somewhere adjacent to them while not necessarily being considered “P5”. Some of that perception comes as a result of the ‘power conference’ label being a creation of college football and thus a bit more clumsy when applied to hoops. But, at least for the men, there is enough talent within the league to warrant that status as a league of note that is above the mid-majors, if not a full on ‘power’ league.

In women’s hoops, we need to re-evaluate that moniker. For years, the Big East has been propped up by UConn, with schools cycling through who gets the privilege of being second best. Some years, it’s Villanova, other years it’s Creighton, Seton Hall or Marquette. But the chasm between the Huskies and the rest of the league is wide. So wide, in fact, that there’s a legit question this year about whether or not the Big East is a one bid conference this season.

It’s with that in mind that I think we, women’s basketball media and fans, need to reorient our thinking towards the A-10 being the unofficial ‘fifth power conference’ in the sport. Richmond has already shown that they’re good enough to be an at-large team, earning an eight seed despite losing in the conference tournament last year. Rhode Island, typically right on the bubble, is 14-3 and leading the league with a shot to make the dance for the first time in three years. Meanwhile, you can’t count out potential bid stealers like George Mason (last year’s conference tourney champ) or Davidson.

Doogan, as I’ll note below in Three Ball, is a legitimate Player of the Year candidate and shouldn’t be penalized for the league she plays in. Because, when you really stack it up, it’s not as easy as people think and deserving of more standing within the conversation. In the last five years, it’s been worthy of two bids or more. Eventually that consistency has to matter and the name brand can’t be as important as the caliber of play the teams are showing on the floor.

Unrivaled returned to play this past week down in Miami, the second season for a product that made waves in the women’s basketball world last year. So far, we’ve gotten some good content, great gameplay moments and a money quote from Napheesa Collier in the WNBA’s labor negotiations (more on that in a second). All in all, it’s been a successful opening week as Unrivaled aims to cement itself as a viable offseason product for women’s basketball.

But what does success look like when the WNBA is on the verge of a work stoppage?

The initial TV numbers (checking in between 100,000 and 200,000 viewers) aren’t good when stacked against last season (300,000+ viewers from first game) and show that a degree of novelty has worn off as the plateau following the first big surge of new fans has stabilized. The players understand that the league’s viability will be measured by this metric and superstars like Breanna Stewart, with some skin in the game at the CBA negotiating table, knows that big numbers help their bargaining position.

The modified 3×3 format is interesting and, it should be said, not for everyone. I’m not particularly partial to it but I still tune in to watch because I like seeing some women’s hoops at the highest level at this time of the year. Unrivaled has done a really great job of telling the stories of their athletes, giving them chances to make their own content and bring fans into the game on social media. The question is whether or not those kinds of metrics have as much teeth to them as the TV numbers do.

As a strike appears on the horizon in the WNBA, I’ve long advocated that Unrivaled should have a contingency plan to expand to 5×5 and take over as a long term option if need be. While it’s too early to know if league ownership, from Alex Bazzell to Napheesa Collier and Stewart, are preparing or prepared for that possibility, there is a job to be done with regard to getting people to tune in. If you can continue to prove that your numbers are sustainably high, it continues to undercut the W’s position that they’re the only option for survival.

The CBA extension deadline passed without a resolution this past week as the nitty-gritty details finally were revealed to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, Alexa Phillipou and others. For those that have been keeping up with the labor battle at a glance, it all comes down to revenue sharing.

As of this writing, the offer on the table from the WNBA is a share of net revenue (what you make after you take out expenses), of which the players would receive 70%.

The players, on the other hand, are advocating for a share of gross revenue (what you make before all the expenses), taking a 30% cut and leaving the remainder to the league. What does that look like in practice? Here is what Shelburne had to say on X…

For reference, every single men’s sports league pays off gross revenue. In the private sector, commission-based jobs are almost always dictated off the gross pay (just ask my agent!). The league is clearly making the argument that because their fixed costs are so significant then it is better for the long term sustainability of the WNBA to pay out net revenue instead of the gross. But, once again, we run into the issue of where the money actually redirects to.

When you consider there are WNBA owners that own their team (42% slice of league revenue) while also having additional stakes via the NBA’s 42% ownership AND the 16% equity stake that was sold off to private investors after COVID, it becomes clear why the players don’t want to go down this road. Any additional revenues off the gross just get shuffled back into the pockets of some individuals that are double or even triple dipping into the league’s coffers.

As the clock continues to tick past the deadline, it feels as though we’re in an impasse that may bleed into the calendar. The WNBA, for their part, continues to act in completely unserious ways, allowing teams to effectively pursue free agents and make offers without any type of collective bargaining agreement in place. Outside of their offices, the AFL-CIO placed their giant inflatable rat, Scabby, to draw attention to the labor fight more broadly. I’m not sure what the endgame is here for the W but it feels like this isn’t sustainable. Either you agree to a lower share of the gross (if the players were being offered 20-25%, I’d probably tell them to take that) or you have to part with a higher share of the NET (51-49 feels like the only acceptable thing there).

Every day is another saga in the W but hopefully the labor dispute comes to an end soon.

Kelly Graves has Oregon back on the right path. - Oregon’s comeback win over USC was somewhat marred by their late loss to Michigan State but the Ducks deserve some shine in the column. Katie Fiso is an All-Conference level guard and, after a couple years in the wilderness, the Tall Firs from Eugene are right back to being regular NCAA Tournament entrants. I know some people don’t like Kelly Graves for whatever reason, but I will always root for someone who is introspective after adversity, learns and gets better from it and finds ways to evolve and succeed. That’s what Oregon is doing and why they’re worth getting on the bandwagon for.

Time To Discuss Maggie Doogan As A Real Player of The Year Candidate. - And it’s not just because she’s our Luxury Tax guest this week. Doogan broke a program record over the weekend, scoring 48 points in the Spiders overtime win over Davidson. It’s the highest scoring tally of the women’s college basketball season so far. The senior is averaging 24.2 points, 8.7 rebounds and 4.8 assists per game on 50-40-90 splits. I’ve already outlined that the A-10 is not a slouch conference and those numbers by a UConn player in the Big East (a lesser conference this year) would make them a runaway favorite. As you’ll hear later this week, she had a chance to make the jump to a major program this summer and chose to stay with what she built in Richmond. Don’t let the league fool you. This is a legit top three Naismith and Wooden candidate.

Utah Deserves Some Shine. - I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical that Gavin Petersen would be able to keep Utah’s momentum up after a bumpy year that ended with losing star guard Gianna Kneepkens to UCLA. But the Utes have managed to stabilize the ship and, behind veteran guard Lani White, are a legit Big 12 title threat. If they can follow up their 87-77 win over TCU this past week with a win over Baylor, their status as a league champion contender becomes very, very real.