March Madness 2024: College Basketball at a Crossroads
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. A co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And it is that time of year again, March Madness, when at least for a month, college basketball is the thing in sports. It's inescapable. It's Butler with two seconds. He's got to put it up. He runs it. He runs it.

The men's game is changing in ways that have been controversial for fans and some disappointing. And I'm thinking about the advent of the transfer portal and the one and done stints for student athletes. It ain't what it used to be. It ain't what I hope it returns to. And I'm not saying I don't want kids to have the same freedom as coaches or sports writers or anybody in the movie. I'm not saying that. All I'm saying is the product ain't that good right now.

Meanwhile, women's college basketball has emerged as an increasingly electrifying force on the sports scene. It's drawing record ratings. And right now, Caitlin Clark of the Iowa Hawkeyes is as well known to fans in the game as LeBron James. And that's not something I would have foreseen in my early days as a sports writer. So I sat down the other day with the New Yorker sports writer, Louisa Thomas.

What in God's name has happened to men's college basketball? It used to be a very exciting thing. March would come around and there would be a pool in every workplace in America and people would have all kinds of opinions and there were established stars and all the rest. And now, I gotta say, not so much. I want to note that you just said something that

a year ago, two years ago, would have been completely unheard of. You qualified college basketball as men's college basketball. Fair enough. Yeah. I mean, men's college basketball is still very big, and CBS will be paying hundreds of millions of dollars for the honor of airing it. Last year, more than 12 million people watched the finals. That was a record low. More than 9 million people watched the women's finals.

That was a record high. 12 million is still more than 9 million. You know, let's not get like way too carried away. But it's true. You know, part of that has to do with the turnover in college basketball because the best players leave for the NBA very early. And there hasn't been a kind of charismatic superstar like, you know, Zion Williamson at Duke where the sort of the big school and the big player were just the perfect match and kind of attracted all this dynamic attention.

Part of it is there is a kind of just excitement about the newness of the women's game that has people talking. And it's not just Kaitlyn Clark. It's Angel Reese at LSU. It's the coaches. You know, Kim Mulkey is a huge figure. Coach Mulkey, 10 minutes to get to a Final Four. What do you tell your team to get there now?

Make free throws and layups. If I was watching this game, I'd turn it off. Look at that score, would you? That's some bad offensive basketball. It might be something to these balls being too bouncy, but that's some bad ball. Make your layups. Make your free throws. Play hard for 10 minutes and see what happens. All right. Thanks, Coach.

Don Staley is like a huge figure. Gina Auriemma is a huge figure. And the men's coaches are kind of like, they're yesterday's, you know, superheroes. Yeah, it's like Rick Pitino whining at press conferences. Exactly. We've seen that before. We saw that a decade ago. You know, his scandals are old. They're stale, you know. He doesn't even throw a chair across the court. Exactly. Yeah. What kind of shit fit is that? Exactly. Exactly.

Can't hold a candle to one of Kim Mulkey's sequined outfits, you know? There you go. So I think that's part of it, too. They're just these kind of great dynamic characters and budding rivalries and a sort of sense of freshness to the whole thing. And it makes no sense in the men's game. If you're a star in your freshman year or sophomore year, it makes absolutely no sense to play in your junior and senior year for economic reasons. Why would you risk a career-ending injury in your junior year or senior year and then

be forced to make a living like a normal human being as opposed to someone who could quite possibly make a fortune as a pro basketball player. It might not even make sense to go to college at all. You know, you could go to the G League. You could go to Europe, you know, great. MVPs are coming out of Europe these days. Now, there is an argument that with the NIL money, name, image, and likeness money, you can get sponsorships. You can get millions of dollars, even if you are playing sports.

college basketball and the best college basketball player in the country, Zach Eadie, who plays for Purdue, is making a lot of money. And that has, you know, he's not a freshman. And that's part of the reason why. But still, I think you're right. There's just not a great reason to stick around for four years unless you just really love the college experience. One other question about the men's game, although this may spread everywhere. It was amazing to me when I saw my, you know, news alerts the other day.

that the Dartmouth men's basketball team, the Dartmouth men's basketball team unionized. This is not, let me, in all due respect to Dartmouth, this is not a good basketball team. This is not a basketball team that its players are making a fortune or that there's a fortune to share. Or how did this happen? Why Dartmouth? And what is it going to lead to?

That's a huge question. A good question. And the NCAA would like to know very much the answer. Thank you. Dartmouth is...

writing a very kind of like carefully worded statement about how it really respects unions and it's very happy that it has all these unions. However, it's student athletes are students first and therefore this is an academic enterprise and they are not athletes at all. So Dartmouth is resisting this effort. I mean, they're expected to appeal. I don't actually know if they've appealed yet. I'm speaking with the New Yorkers, Louisa Thomas. More in a moment. On Radiolab. I lie down, I close my eyes.

And I fell asleep. Both Shakespeare and Cervantes referred to sleep as death. Danger, danger, danger. Quit, Mark. You're dreaming. You're hurting me. Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? It's a mystery. It's hard. Everybody does it, from the cradle to the grave. I'm tired. And we don't know why. That's a shameful state of affairs. Sleep, from Radiolab. Listen wherever you get podcasts or on the WNYC app. All right, let's get to the subject that we really want to talk about.

I'm watching these games and I'm watching these highlights on SportsCenter in the morning of Caitlin Clark. It's not that she's good. It's not that she's great. She's insane. Up in time, Clark for the win. She dribbles down the court and she stops at the logo 40 feet away.

And it's not like it's the end of the quarter or the end of the half. She's just pulling up and dumping him in from 40 feet. What is going on? Just like the coach drew up the play, right? Oh, my God. It's insane. I actually turned on an Iowa game earlier this season, and I thought I was watching the highlights. Like, I thought it was halftime, and they were showing the highlights. But no, it was playing in real time. It was just, like, one logo three after another. I mean, it was absolutely bananas. She is, like, just...

She's got, you know, the whole old cliche, she's got ice in her veins. Like, I'm sorry, but she does. No, any other player. I can't think of any other player, including Pete Maravich, who didn't shoot threes because of when he played.

But even Steph Curry doesn't shoot from 40 feet on a regular basis. Is it a case of unbelievable skill or radical impatience? I think that players know to crowd her as soon as she gets anywhere near the three-point line, which is one of the reasons why she is also the best passer in the country. Well, she seems to look to pass. I know it sounds insane after what I just said, but she also looks to pass first. Phenomenal passer. Just such great court vision.

So tell me a little bit about Caitlin Clark. Where does she come out of? How did this player become herself? I'll give you one guess. What led her to Iowa? Iowa led her to Iowa. Yeah.

She wants to stay home. She's from Iowa. There is a statue of her in Butter at the Iowa County Fair or State Fair. She is a pretty low key person. She's declined most interview requests, including my own, but still hoping to change that. And she is, you know, she's very wealthy now because of these NIL deals. Yeah.

Do we know how wealthy and what those deals are like? I think it's several million. I mean, it's Gatorade. It's Nike. They're big, big deals. And she's managed by Accel, which is one of the top basketball endorsement agencies in the world. So, or in the country, certainly. So, yeah, she's making a lot of money. And it's in the seven figures. What are her plans for the future?

She has declared for the WNBA draft. She will be the number one pick by the Indiana Fever. So she's going to stick around in the Midwest. But she, you know, she could potentially change the landscape of women's sport. The question is whether or not she can carry that attention with her into the pros and also whether or not she can leave some of that attention behind. Like, to what extent is this a unique phenomenon around a unique player? And to what extent is this a, like...

people are turning in and they're going to watch women's basketball now. Let's ask the uncomfortable question. She's certainly not the first phenomenal basketball player in the women's game. What role, if any, does race have to play with her popularity and the amount of attention she's getting? Oh, you can't ignore it. I mean, certainly there have been...

you know, women's basketball, like men's basketball is a predominantly black sport and the stars are predominantly white historically. I mean, and that's in the women's game, in the women's game. And that does not mean that these women should don't deserve to be. I mean, Sue Bird is one of the great all-time players. You know, Diana Taurasi is the greatest ever, like just full stop. These women are great players in their own right. And I don't think anyone would dispute that at the same time. Like it's,

disproportionate the attention they get is, you know, it's startling to see how many of the game's biggest stars are white, given how many of the game's greatest players are black. And you can see some of the racial disparity. You know, it came in, it kind of came to the fore last year during the finals when the LSU team, which was led by Angel Reese, who is a very outspokenly, you know, proud black woman was. And a phenomenal player. And a phenomenal player. And one of the best players in the country and still one of the best players in the country was,

was criticized for sort of making these kind of taunting gestures that the Caitlin Clark had also made, and Caitlin Clark was never criticized for the same thing. I mean, there's a racial element to that. In other words, Angel Reese's gestures were racialized in the attention they got in the press. Exactly. And you just, you kind of can't ignore that. At the same time,

I don't think there's any person who's... You yourself have watched her. You can't say that Caitlin Clark doesn't deserve the attention that she's got. No, she plays her heart out. She's extraordinary, as is Angel Reese. You also see it playing out now in that South Carolina is the best team in the country. And it's led by Don Staley, who is...

another outspoken Black woman. And that team doesn't get the attention, you know, that it deserves and the respect that it deserves. It's undefeated again. It was undefeated last year. Would have probably won the championship if not for a very, very cold shooting night from outside and for Katelyn Clark herself. And, you know, this is a team that, yeah, it deserves more attention. And, you know, does race play a part? This is America, probably. Yeah.

Now, one amazing dimension to sports in general, but even college sports that has changed things, is the legalization of gambling. The legalization of gambling is just ubiquitous both as a matter of advertising, as a matter of activity. How has that changed the sport, if any? How aware are the players of this dimension of their jobs?

I mean, betting has been around for a long time. Legalized betting is relatively new. But when I was in fourth grade, I won 50 bucks on my mom's office. You know, wait a minute. You won 50 bucks. That is seriously impressive. I know. Well, thank you. But yeah, just to say that to say to say that gambling's been around, but it's in the billions of dollars. You know, I've seen estimates of last year. You know, this is an estimate of how many

how much money they thought people were going to pay, but it was like $15 billion or something. What's actually more unnerving to me than like a lot of people are placing bets, most of these bets that people are placing are $20 bets in their office pool. What's sort of more kind of unnerving to me and where I really...

see it is how much betting money is infiltrating the coverage of these games. Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's just like... And it's talked about as part of the conversation of the sport. You watch an NFL game, you watch any game of anything...

And it's just, you know, Shaquille O'Neal is telling Charles Barkley that he's got X dollars on the game and is he taking the under or the over? It's every moment in the game is sort of potential, you know, time to get a hit of money, I guess. All right. Let's try to help our gambling listeners. I know you're loathe to make picks, but there are listeners out there struggling to fill out their brackets.

Are there any potential March Madness upsets or Cinderella's you want to predict at this early juncture? I'm so indecisive. Who looks like a good shot at winning the NCAA title? Who's in the mix? On the women's side, I cannot go against South Carolina. They are just such a phenomenally good basketball team. On the men's side, I'm going to go with UConn to repeat.

Really? Yeah. Why not? Really? They're kind of like a scrappy college basketball league. Will you be putting cash money on this? Absolutely not. I'm not insane. I think that'd be a conflict for a sports writer, right? Yeah. Well, no. Are you kidding? It's legal. All right. Well, I'm saving my money, not betting it on the college sport, waiting for the injuries to come clear on the Knicks. And then I'm all in on that. All in on the Knicks. Thank you so much. Bless you.

You can find Louisa Thomas' writing at newyorker.com on virtually every sport. And if you're hungry for more basketball knowledge, you'll want to check out Louisa's terrific profile of Nikola Jokic. Probably the best player in the game right now. It's at newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's the program for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kal Aliyah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decat.

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