Good Ratings for a Bad Game

Over the last couple of weeks, women's basketball fandom has basked in the post-season glow of the 2010 NCAA Championship. It was almost a dream matchup - in one corner were the Connecticut Huskies, which were shooting for a second consecutive undefeated season. In the other corner were the Stanford Cardinal, a challenger which only had one loss to blemish their own record...and that loss was to Connecticut, a team they were leading at halftime in their previous matchup.

The ratings for the finals game on ESPN were at 2.7. You might not think much of a 2.7 rating if you know anything about television ratings, but for a women's basketball game it's a great rating. The rating was 29 percent above the previous year's Connecticut-Louisville finals matchup. After months of ignorant writing by clueless sportswriters that Connecticut's dominance of the women's game was bad for the sport - a criticism rarely hurled at the John Wooden UCLA Bruins or the Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls - women's basketball advocates could show that if Connecticut dominance was hurting anything, it certainly wasn't hurting the television ratings.

I overheard the men at my day job - men who keep up with all sorts of macho sports like football - mention the game in passing. The game was clearly on their radar, and they were at least aware of its existence, if nothing else. But before women's basketball fans jump to the conclusion that women's basketball is ready to enter a new era based on those ratings, let me pose a question in response: what kind of game did those new viewers see?

The game they saw, frankly, was a mess. Connecticut won the game by shooting 32.8 percent from the floor, a staggeringly low number by anyone's standards. Stanford's shooting was 26.5 percent, even worse. The Cardinal's shooting percentage was so low that their 3-point shooting (36.4 percent) eclipsed their shooting from close range. Jayne Appel, Stanford's prize player, went 0-for-12 during the game and probably cost herself a chance at being picked #2 in the WNBA draft.

Add to that the fact that Stanford committed 20 personal fouls and sent the Huskies to the line 22 times, where Connecticut proceeded to hit exactly nine of those free throws. Maya Moore, possibly the best college player in the country, went 2-for-5 from the free throw line. Tina Charles, the #1 pick in the WNBA draft, went 1-for-5. The Huskies only shot 40.9 percent from the free throw line. (Stanford's 75 percent free throw percentage might seem impressive...but the Cardinal only went to the line three times.) In Dean Oliver's Four Factors, the Huskies certainly had the Free Throws Attempted stat wrapped up. And there was definitely a lot of rebounding, due to a lot of missed shots.

When sportswriters - who are usually males that don't watch women's sports - deign to report on a women's game, they tend to frame games differently than a match between two men's teams. When reporting a men's game, games are won because one team was better than the other team - yes, Disco Tech went 0-for-5 during the last couple of minutes because Gotham U applied its famous killer defense: those boys at Tech tried, but couldn't break the wall. Whereas if this were a women's game, the conclusion drawn would be a different one, namely that Disco Tech got the yips and Gotham U merely took advantage of Tech's ineptitude. Reporters look at men's games through one frame and women's games through another.

However, I don't think you can look at those percentages in Connecticut-Stanford II and conclude that this was a game of thrilling defense. Neither team turned the ball over that much, so no one was having their pockets picked. When I think of a team that got the short end of a defensive struggle, I think of 35 percent shooting as "low shooting caused by defensive pressure". When both teams can't reach 35 percent, my conclusion is simply ineptitude and sloppy play on both sides.

So what would have a casual viewer have seen if he or she had tuned in to watch the two greatest women's basketball teams in the country?

* A horrible shooting game where neither team could find the basket for long stretches of time.
* One of the supposedly best players in the country (Appel) not hitting a single shot.
* Super-duper most-elite-of-all Connecticut racking up a grand total of 12 points in the first half....
* ...but Stanford only had 20 first half points. Furthermore, they held the Huskies to approximately 25 percent shooting in the first half...and lost.

The game at times threatened to degenerate into the type of game played by junior high girls in any local middle school across the country. There was a lot of furious running around but very little basketball being played. To sum up: the game stunk.

What would a casual viewer conclude? Probably that there might be a lot of smoke sent up by women's basketball advocates regarding this game, but very little fire in the final product. Given an argument between a clueless college sportswriter who claims that women's basketball is just an affirmative action sports product consisting of gangly women that can't shoot and a women's basketball advocate that states that women's basketball is a thrilling spectacle where elite clashes are action packed thrillfests...the casual viewer might end up siding with the former if this was that viewer's only look at the women's game.

All right. Put down your guns. I agree with the women's basketball advocates and not the clueless sportswriters. In 99 out of a 100 matches, Connecticut-Stanford would be a thrillfest, but every now and then you get a disappointment of a title game. Anyone who watched the Phoenix-Indiana 2009 WNBA Finals or who sees a Spartak Moscow-Ekaterinburg match - like the one today - knows that the women's game can be flat-out amazing to watch. Besides, not every NBA Game 7 or Super Bowl matchup is a Game For The Ages; we shouldn't expect that to be true of the Women's NCAA Finals either.

Ratings interest me to a certain degree - they indicate the amount of interest there was in an event at the time of the event. Clearly, even though the jockocracy attempted to claim that Connecticut's excellence was bad for the game, people wanted to tune in and see what all this hubbub about Connecticut was about. That's good - a team playing at a high standard of excellence will attract viewers no matter what the sport. However, every advocate of the women's game knows that we have to take the long view. We have to treasure our triumphs, but not be complacent. So my question is this: if the only women's basketball game you saw in 2010 was Connecticut-Stanford II, what would be the chances that you'd come back next year to see another one?