Don’t let anyone tell you that momentum is slowing down for women’s basketball.

Sure, we’re staring down the barrel of a delayed start to the WNBA season but that is only one part of the story. After a somewhat sluggish start to the year, NCAA women’s hoops is building hype on every major network. ESPN, according to Front Office Sports, has seen a 39% increase in ratings and up double-digits year over year on all four individual four letter networks (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU).

FOX and FS1 also report gains of 8% and 12% with the Big Ten Network similarly seeing a 15% uptick.

Not too shabby, eh?

However you want to spin it, the sport continues to grow and build momentum towards what may be one of the most entertaining NCAA Tournaments in an era chock full of them. If you missed any of Tyler’s Sunday recap of Georgia’s upset of Vanderbilt, you can find it here.

Now, onto the column!

You have got to be tough to win in the SEC.

I’ve covered a lot of sports and seen some pretty animated coaches at postgame press conferences but I have never seen anything like Vic Schaefer on Thursday night. His No. 4 Longhorns were thoroughly dismantled by No. 5 Vanderbilt in what felt like a statement game from Shea Ralph’s resurgent Commodores. After nearly 20 minutes waiting for him to arrive, Vic gave the assembled press an all-timer…

Much like Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell, Schaefer’s comments about this team being ‘one of the softest’ he’s ever coached were met with mixed reactions. Personally, there are two notable distinctions between what the Texas head coach said and what his younger contemporary in Knoxville did.

As Tyler and I discussed on Ball Up Top a couple weeks ago, Caldwell just hasn’t built up the long term credibility to where that kind of public call out lands as the motivation it’s intended to be. Sure, some people don’t love the concept, but going after your team in a postgame presser like that is a pretty common tactic we see coaches employ.

We, after all, aren’t that far removed from Geno Auriemma jokingly saying “If we win, you can go out and have a great time and celebrate. If we lose, just go out and walk into the ocean and just keep walking”, about being in the Bahamas for a 2024 preseason tournament.

Sometimes, we just let the greats do this.

While Schaefer is still chasing that elusive NCAA championship, his resume is such that he is a bit more credible in arbitrating who is tough and what that looks like on a basketball court. Not only that, he was willing to take responsibility for his shortcomings as well. I asked him to follow up on something he said in his opening statement that night, about either ‘coaching it or allowing it’ when it came to his teams’ perceived softness.

“That translates from practice; my fault,” he told me. “It’s probably a little bit of both and again, I’ll wear it. No problem. My fault. I’ll wear all of it. But it’s gonna stop now.”

That right there is the other difference in my mind. While Caldwell surely went back to her team and took accountability after the fact, Schaefer put most of the onus on himself for allowing that culture to fester within his locker room. Because, ultimately, he’s completely right.

You cannot take a night off in this league.

Just ask Vanderbilt, who followed up two top ten wins by being upset by Georgia. Or maybe try LSU, who once again can’t solve their South Carolina problem. Texas managed to hold off Tennessee while Kentucky upset Ole Miss. And that’s just in the last 48 hours!

While SEC supremacy is sometimes puffed up in the same way college football can, these last few weeks has made that arrogance feel earned. Every night is a battle here and I’m very curious how much that battle testing and need for consistent toughness helps (propels them mentally) or hurts (breaks them down physically) teams come March.

Much like the National Player of the Year race, one that appears to be firmly between UConn’s Sarah Strong and Vanderbilt’s Mikayla Blakes, the Coach of the Year vote is one where there are no wrong answers. What Shea Ralph has done in Nashville is second to none while Kim Barnes Arico may have one of the best teams in Michigan program history on her hands.

But, are we letting the plodding pace and lockdown defense of Duke cloud what should be obvious? Shouldn’t Kara Lawson be in these conversations as well?

The Blue Devils finished the 2025 season 29-8 with an ACC Tournament title in hand along with a trip to the Elite Eight. Despite losing the dynamic Oluchi Okananwa to Maryland, Duke felt like an early season ACC favorite and potential Final Four dark horse.

By December, they were 3-6.

Since that low point, the Blue Devils have won 16 straight games, punctuated by victories over top 10 Louisville and top 25 crosstown rival North Carolina. Toby Fournier is now the star everyone expected her to be at the beginning of the season and the rest of the supporting cast is winning on the boards. Given how badly this season started, Lawson feels like an easy choice for Coach of The Year. Imagine telling everyone back in December, following Flau’jae Johnson’s flex on her former Team USA coach, that Duke would be 14-0 and the ACC title favorite by mid-February. Some may not have believed it. I’d be among them. But others — those who believe in Lawson and her emerging status as one of the sports’ great enigmas — are seeing their faith rewarded.

I’ll say this much. I do not envy those voting for Coach of the Year this season.

Maybe Breanna Stewart and I are just eternal optimists but it feels like we may be in the endgame of the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement negotiation. If there’s one conclusion you can draw from the various stories relating to the labor battle this past week, it’s that the priorities of the player’s association are actually rooted in a much more equitable position than we initially thought.

I get it, the revenue share number is the headliner and the de facto figure to fight over.

But I thought this quote from Katie Barnes’ well-reported anonymous survey on the negotiations deserved a bit more play…

"I think so,” said one player when asked about how represented they felt by the WNBPA, “On the [Feb. 2] call, there were a few players who were kind of in my position. And I do feel like what they spoke to was very true for myself as well. So I think we are getting, yes, the superstars, but also the [veteran minimum] players, the role players. This league is 144, or more now, it's not only about the top 20 players, right? The rest of the league has to matter. And I do feel like my voice was heard."

Couple that with two other quotes later in the story outlining housing as their top issues after salary, along with Stewie’s comments on the importance of the league conceding on that point, and the idea comes into focus.

With housing now out of the way, will we see the players be willing to concede on some of the revenue sharing percentages and draw us closer to an agreement?

I would certainly think so.

Outside of retirement benefits and pensions, which will be a central subject of every labor fight from here on out, it feels as though housing for the lower end of the salary spectrum was the last thing the players were truly dug in on. If that is the stone that needed to be moved so the water could continue to flow, then it signals a huge win for the WNBPA as a force for all of its players, not just the top earners. If there are mistakes that unions, especially in pro sports, tend to make it’s allowing the biggest names to dictate rules that benefit them at the expense of the rest of the player pool. Here, we see the league willing to make a concession that will benefit the whole, even if it means the end result is budging on revenue sharing percentages that would see the biggest players stand to earn more.

I’m curious where the magic number is for the PA and league to finally agree. My personal benchmark has always been 20% of the gross revenue being distributed to the players along with the housing and facilities requirements that the WNBA has already conceded on. While it’s not the final number the players want, it would be a transformational change that can be easily built upon in the next CBA as baseline numbers rise across all metrics. If we can get there, then throw up the ball and let’s get it done.

The allegations in six lawsuits filed against Pittsburgh women’s basketball head coach Tory Verdi and the University are troubling, to say the absolute least. The plaintiffs — former players including starters Makayla Elmore and Brooklynn Miles — detailed what they believe was a pattern of verbal abuse, gender-based harassment and retaliation, to name a few.

The allegations range from the positively creepy (“I don’t like you as a player, but I’d let my son date you,” he allegedly told former Pitt player Bella Perkins in 2024) to the outright bigoted (Verdi allegedly told an international player to “go back home because ICE is coming”). That’s before you get to some of the bigger accusations of pushing players to return from injury earlier than expected and retaliatory behavior through weaponizing the transfer portal (a sadly not unheard of practice for coaches, by the way).

The University is standing ten toes down behind their coach, who has done absolutely nothing to earn it. Verdi was 21-42 and a paltry 7-29 in ACC play before this year. This season they’re 8-19 and have won just won league game this entire year.

Beyond the nastiness of the accusations and the fact that there are six plaintiffs, there is no legitimate reason for Pitt to defend this as an athletic department. Verdi’s teams are a write-in win for almost every team in the ACC and have been since he arrived from UMass, who has continued to succeed even without him. So what gives?

There’s a trend emerging in women’s basketball that should be concerning just about everyone.

Some time in the last two to three seasons, misconduct by coaches stopped becoming a fireable offense. Florida head coach Cam Newbauer was let go in 2021 amid similar accusations but some since then, things have changed. Quentin Hillsman, who left Syracuse that same year after misconduct allegations, quietly returned to the sidelines at Ole Miss last year.

Nebraska head coach Amy Williams found herself at the center of a lawsuit filed by former player Ashley Scoggin, Penn State’s Carolyn Kieger was accused last year of fostering a bad team environment and now Verdi is facing six different lawsuits all alleging similar types of misconduct. In all three cases, the university’s stood behind their coaches and no one saw any type of discipline from a higher level.

In the era of NIL and the transfer portal, these types of lawsuits and allegations can muddy an already turbid and fluid situation. Misconduct allegations can have a wide range of validities and outcomes but the vociferous defense of athletic departments, rather than a desire to interrogate the claims further, feels like bad business beyond bad ethics. Are any of these programs currently good enough to warrant flexible morals (not that they ever should be but we still have to understand the reality we live in)? It doesn’t even need to be a one-strike policy but not even removing the coach while an investigation plays out feels like malpractice in a multitude of ways. The dude is a bust in the win/loss column anyway.

Perhaps all of these cases are layered and nuanced, and perhaps maybe schools are just playing defense on behalf of coaches that are being unjustly maligned or misunderstood. But the risk in not believing these claims is continuing to make yourself a program synonymous with dysfunction and failure. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that people in decision-making positions are not as myopically motivated by the bottom line as we thought, but it’s worth watching in women’s basketball an emerging and concerning subculture of complicity to misconduct. It can’t take root, otherwise we’ll wake up one day and have an issue like the one the NWSL is still digging itself out from.

The sport deserves better and, more importantly, the young women deserve better. Full stop.

If there’s been a type of women’s college basketball program that has been adversely effected by the transfer portal in a particularly acute way, it’s the March Cinderella. In past years, it would be easy for South Dakota State to load up on talent and upset a couple of power-conference teams en route to a second weekend in the NCAA Tournament. But the portal, NIL, revenue sharing and realignment have really capped the ability of those schools to maintain and stockpile talent.

Think about the Jackrabbits, for instance. They have Brooklyn Meyer, one of the best mid-major players in America. But her running mate, Haleigh Timmer, left for Oklahoma State and is an All-Big-12 caliber player down in Stillwater. It’s great for her and the Cowgirls but takes substantial teeth out of SDSU’s ability to compete with deeper power conference teams come bracket play.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some benefits.

What all of the aforementioned things have done is allow for more mid-major teams to get a shot to compete for their individual league championship. Where singular programs used to stockpile talent and be nearly unbeatable from January to late February, now the stars are more easily dispersed even if the overall floor of the team is lower than prior years.

Sadly, the NCAA Tournament committee appears to see this not as a deepening of the overall March Madness pool but a means to further constrict access of mid-major teams.

Let me give you an example of two mid-major conferences that deserve more than one bid this year…

Atlantic 10:

Rhode Island: 23-2, 14-0 A-10, NCAA NET: 39

Marquee wins: NC State, Richmond

Richmond: 22-4, 13-1 A-10, NCAA NET: 44

Marquee wins: Green Bay, Columbia

Summit League:

North Dakota State: 23-2, 12-0 Summit, NCAA NET: 41

Marquee wins: Montana State, South Dakota State

South Dakota State: 20-6, 10-2 Summit, NCAA NET: 45

Marquee wins: Rice, Murray State, Gonzaga

I just have a hard time believing that any of these teams are markedly worse than whatever 21-12 team the committee will inevitably throw in from either the Big Ten or Big 12. They may not last past the second round but the possibility of early mid-major upsets — something that can be missing from women’s March Madness brackets each year — but more potential Cinderellas can make for more entertaining tournament basketball.

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Don’t worry about Raven Johnson’s WNBA prospects, instead appreciate her significance to a great college program…

After watching Raven Johnson show up in the clutch again, this time against LSU, I realized that we need to just let the senior guard be a legendary college basketball figure and stop worrying about what she’ll be in the WNBA. Maybe she’s going to be a star at the next level, maybe she might not be. But I know that we’re watching a foundational player to a program that is a standard in the sport right now. The same way you can’t write the Stewie years at UConn without Morgan Tuck, you can’t explain South Carolina’s last four years, losses to titles and all, without Johnson. She’s on the current Gamecock Mt. Rushmore of women’s hoops, and I choose to enjoy that as we reach the end of her career in Columbia.

The Big 12 may be the best regular season title race this year…

God, the Big 12 is some wonderful madness this year, isn’t it? I couldn’t tell you if any of the top teams — from TCU to Texas Tech to Baylor and West Virginia — will make it past the Sweet Sixteen but I can tell you that at least three of them are likely to be there. I know a lot of people are taking shots at the league this season for not having a bonafide Final Four favorite and I can understand that. But the Ball-Knowers are not a casual bunch and if you’re reading down this far into the column, you at least want to know ball if you don’t already. The Big 12 regular season title race is going to be awesome the rest of the way. If you want games that feel like March in mid February, they got what you need…

Unrivaled has hit its stride…

I continue to impressed with how Unrivaled has navigated the post-NFL portion of their schedule. After a wonderful event in Philadelphia, there are now more cities that the 3×3 league plans to hit in future years. The TV ratings will likely stabilize but it was interesting to hear that Unrivaled, according to FOS’ Annie Costabile, also realizes that their big challenge is converting social reach to TV viewers.

If you’ve made it this far…

Take a second and read Bruce Arthur’s column in the Toronto Star about Canadian mogul skier Mikael Kingsbury.

Let me tell you a quick story…

When I was coming up in mogul skiing, the American system basically had an ‘A’ level and a ‘B’ level. ‘A’ extended all the way up to the Olympics while ‘B’ was developmental, capped at a regional level and usually unofficially age capped at 13.

So I’m 12 years old, at East Regional Championships in Bristol, New York when I watch this YouTube video for the first time. The dad’s were hanging out at the hotel bar and the kids were congregating elsewhere in the lobby. Quickly, we ran to show our parents the video of this 14 year Canadian kid doing stuff we couldn’t believe. It’s how I imagine basketball reacted to LeBron James when they first saw clips out of St. Vincent, St. Mary’s.

Over the next decade or so, he’s more or less tortured the men’s mogul skiing world with a near-automatic championship aura that rivals prime Tiger Woods in red on Sunday.

And no, that’s not hyperbole.

From 2011-2025, he’s been the number one skier in the world, save for 2020-2021. Why, you may ask? Because he got hurt. Name a record in freestyle skiing and he’s got it.

In the wake of his dominance, a challenger from Japan arose. Ikuma Horishima, who grew up idolizing Kingsbury, realized one thing: the only way to beat the perfect skier was to put it all on the line every time the two met. It led to epic crashes, seismic upsets and a rivalry that’s defined the sport in the last half-decade. Everyone who has come for the King had to do it this way.

So, it only felt natural that all of his challengers fell the same way on Sunday morning in Livigno. It’s believed to be Kingsbury’s last Olympic event, putting an epic coda on nearly two decades of Quebecois-based Canadian dominance in the sport. I get to talk about mogul skiing once every four years and sometimes, when you’re your own Editor-in-Chief, you can shoehorn in a great story just because.

Long live the King. American mogul skiing’s long national nightmare is over at last.