Let's Hear It For The Girls

Maya Moore - UConn Huskies superstar

On December 21^st, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team will almost assuredly break one of college sports most prestigious records, eclipsing UCLA’s legendary winning streak of 88 games. The streak, that started opening night of the 2008-09 season, will be downplayed by many. It is, after all, only women’s basketball, the red-headed stepchild to the men’s version.

Bryant Gumbel has taken to the forefront of this negative campaign, imploring the viewers of his humbly named HBO show, “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel” to not compare UConn’s accomplishments to those of UCLA’s.

Bruno Sammartino

Surely, in the coming days, many other writers looking to make a name for themselves, will follow suit. There will be disparaging comments; there will be giggles and insults at the notion that this record is any more legitimate than the longest WWE championship reign. (Bruno Sammartino, for the record, at 2,803 days, or nearly eight years.)

You’ll read that women’s basketball is inferior to men’s, that if you put UConn up against a twenty-loss Division III men’s team, the D3 team would win. You’ll read that UConn plays a weak schedule and that their conference is comparable to a mid-major. You will read that the Huskies only win because the best players all go there, and that the difference between the very best and the second level is a Michael Strahan front-teeth size gap.

Pardon my French, but that’s pure 100% grade A bullshit.

Before I defend the Huskies, let me assert that I am NOT one of their faithful, nor do I care to watch women’s basketball. Call me a typical 21^st century American male, but I prefer to watch the game played above the rim, with lightning fast point guards and seven-foot giants beating each other up beneath the rim. The more fundamentally sound women’s game has the same effect on me as a turkey dinner, three glasses of red wine, and a bottle of Tylenol PM.

And, Gumbel isn’t totally off-base. UConn’s record cannot possibly be compared to UCLA’s. The women’s game is different than the men’s. They use different balls, there is no time limit to get the ball across half-court, the shot clock is 5 seconds shorter in the women’s game, and the three-point line is closer; the talent pool isn’t nearly as deep and there aren’t as many teams capable of pulling off an upset. Heck, you can’t even compare UCLA’s record to current men’s college basketball. In today’s men’s basketball, with the one-and-done rule and the white-hot spotlight of the NCAA Tournament, you will be more likely to see Glenn Beck and Keith Olberman sing ‘I Got You Babe’ together on Al-Jazeera than an NCAA Division-One team finish even one season without a loss.

However, that doesn’t diminish the accomplishments of the UConn women’s basketball. Not by a long shot. And, it doesn’t make it any less impressive in the landscape of sport.

Some stats from the UConn winning streak that I pulled directly from Jack McCallum’s article in the December 13^th issue of Sports Illustrated and from my own research:

·         UConn has beaten 29 ranked teams.

·         Sixteen of those teams were ranked in the top 10.

·         The average margin of victories over these teams is 24.6. Twenty-four-point-effing-six.

·         Their average margin of victory over TOP TEN opponents in 2009-10 was THIRTY-THREE.

·         The margin of victory overall is 32.3.

·         Only two opponents during the winning streak has even come within ten points of the Huskies. (#2 Baylor earlier this season, who UConn beat 65-64, and Stanford in the 2009-10 National Championship game.)

·         Included in the streak are twelve NCAA tournament games and six Big East conference tournament games.

·         During the 2010-11 season alone, they are scheduled to play THIRTEEN ranked teams, four in the Top Ten.

I think that disproves any nay-sayer that says UConn plays a “soft” schedule. There isn’t a men’s team on the planet that would dare attempt to tackle the schedule the Huskies do every year, taking on multiple out-of-conference ranked opponents, including the toughest teams in the country.

This = talent pool in women's
basketball

The talent pool may as well be equivalent to a urine-warm cement hole with a giant mushroom in the middle dumping water for kids to play under. In short, it’s pretty damn shallow. That makes the lesser women’s teams chances of beating UConn slightly better than winning PowerBall….four times…in a month. All the best players go to the top schools, leaving little for everyone else to pick from. However, this only means that the top tier teams are all very, very good. And, as proven above, UConn takes them all on and beats every one of them. Handily.

Muhammad Ali is widely considered the greatest prize fighter ever to live. And, he beat most of the best; Foreman, Liston, and Frazier to name three. But, he also pounded on the Glass Joe’s of the era; guys like “Big Cat” Williams and George Chuvalo. Does that tarnish his reputation as “The Greatest”? Is he less of a champion because he beat a bunch of chumps in between marquee match-ups?

It’s not about the doormats the Huskies beat up on, it’s about the NCAA’s “best”, who get equally pounded on by them.

UConn dominates for the most part because they get the top players in the land, and that will be held against them. But, the UCLA Bruins had fellas named Alcindor, Walton, Wilkes, and Bibby, easily some of the best players of that era. For the most part, teams with the most talent, win. That’s how sports work. A team should be celebrated for acquiring a team of All-American high-schoolers. What does it say about a program if a player is willing to ride pine instead of start for a different top five school? It says the program is damned worth it. Using the “great players” argument is insane, but it will be done. Just watch.

male athletes - bigger, stronger,
less attractive

Even with these great players, the Huskies would find it difficult to beat most men’s basketball teams. This is an indisputable fact. However, it wouldn’t be because the players aren’t as skilled as the men. It is purely and solely because male athletes are more physically gifted. They are, for the most part, much bigger, stronger, and can run faster. This enormous difference in size and speed would be nearly impossible for the Huskies to overcome. But, if you put the UConn women in a fundamentals competition; a contest of shooting, passing, defense, and rebounding, you would find the Husky women to be vastly superior to most of the best Division I men’s teams, if not all of them. That is also an indisputable fact.

So, on December 21^st, when the UConn Huskies become the team with college basketball’s longest winning streak, don’t disparage them, don’t call them inferior to UCLA, and don’t compare them. There’s no way of quantifying it.

Instead, recognize that the win will be a benchmark for a team that can be considered the most dominant basketball team in college sports history; recognize that what you are witnessing is history in the making, a culmination of the greatest players playing their greatest every night. And, recognize that those trying to minimize this accomplishment are only digging hard for some attention, much like a dog whining at the door or a child smearing its feces on a computer screen. Don’t give into them. They have no factual argument, except the one they're making up.

I’m rooting for the Huskies. Maybe I’ll even subject myself to two hours of slow, below the basket fundamentally sound play just to support them. After all, how can I resist history in the making?