No. 1 seed Stanford was upset by Ole Miss in the NCAA tournament

For those who still cling to it their fingertips to the argument that theirs the lack of interest in women’s college basketball is due to its absence competitive balance, just let it go and fall into a sea of ​​bad buys. You can join the crowd who believe that Mens’ College Basketball is more fundamentally sound than the NBA and that stationary quarterbacks are more effective than mobile ones. Unfortunately for Tara VanDerveer and the Stanford Cardinal, they were again. program to be a major upset on the chin that highlighted the strength of competition in women’s college basketball.

In the 2023 tournament, Stanford was the No. 1 seed for the third consecutive season. The program won a national championship in 2021 and was in the Final Four last season. But on Sunday night, Stanford’s 2023 run came to a shockingly abrupt end. VanDerveer’s team was eliminated from the tournament by No. 8 seed Ole Miss 54-49 in the second round.

Stanford has been here before

With that loss, Stanford became the only No. 1 seed not to advance the Sweet 16 since 2009. Also, while Virginia’s Men’s Basketball Team shocked America by losing to a No. 16 seed in 2017 as a No. 1 seed, the Stanford Women’s Basketball Team is actually the first Division I basketball team to suffer such a loss. In 1998, Stanford lost to 16th-seeded Harvard in the first round due to injury.

When Geno Auriemma and Pat Summit coached dominant programs to multiple NCAA championships, some argued that level of dominance was not good for the sport. Winning 90 straight games over three seasons at Connecticut was “boring,” even though the UCLA men who won 88 in a row in the early 1970s were “legendary.” This is lazy reasoning, which is often the wrong sideto-made by history’s resident Darren Rovell last March.

Buick aired a commercial highlighting the lack of coverage women’s college sports received compared to men’s. Rovell decided to quickly post his opinion on this. He posted the commercial in its entirety, adding his thoughts on why he thinks the women’s Division I championship doesn’t get the same media coverage as the men’s.

Rovell posted this on Twitter just before the start of the 2022 NCAA basketball tournaments. in 2021 three two-digit seeds they won their first round matches in the women’s tournament. In the first round of the women’s tournament following Rovell’s tweet, Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes, just like this season, were two seeds. Unfortunately for Iowa, he didn’t have 27 consecutive points or assists like he did Sunday last season. In 2022, the Hawkeyes lost to Creighton in the second round. They are headed to the Sweet 16 this season.

The fact that a highly recruited player like Clark chose to stay close to home and play at Iowa instead of UConn, South Carolina, Notre Dame or Stanford proves that women’s college basketball these days is far from being a competition. featuring only a few outstanding players. competitors.

March is a wild time in college basketball. In a single-player format, it’s almost always a realistic possibility that a higher seed will upset a lower seed. For those who thought it was Cinderella has ignored the women’s game, here’s a reminder from Stanford that not only has she always been around, but she’s making her presence felt more and more recently.

So for those of you who don’t care about Women’s College Basketball, you’ve all been warned that the “lack of competition” argument is vile. For those who don’t like today’s game and didn’t appreciate the dominance of UConn and Tennessee of yesteryear, the problem is in the mirror. Not on TV