The Bulletin (Conn.), March 28:
The lead headline in The Bulletin’s Monday sports section – “Coach not sorry for dominance” – was accurate but jarring. It was referring to the UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, who again finds himself defending his program’s sterling record of athletic accomplishment.
No, Auriemma is not sorry for coaching a winning team. Nor should he be. What coach in his right mind would apologize for putting his student-athletes leaps and bounds ahead of the competition?
But that’s just the position the Huskies occupy in the NCAA tournament – they are three wins short of their fourth straight national championship, an unequaled achievement in the sport. And as has been the case in recent years, there seem to be no comers capable of overcoming the UConn women’s collective prowess – not by a long shot.
UConn broke the standing record for margin of victory on Saturday, clobbering Mississippi State by a staggering 60 points in a Sweet Sixteen matchup. And double-digit wins have become the norm, not the exception, for the team.
Is there a point at which a program is too good? Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy thinks so, and he provoked the discussion Saturday when he tweeted that the Huskies “are killing the women’s game.”
It is indeed true that it’s not as fun to watch players who badly outmatch their opponents. And there’s something to be said for the Huskies’ effect on the women’s tournament on the whole – and fans’ interest in it.
But, as Shaughnessy said in a column published Monday, it’s not because fans don’t like dynasties or women athletes. It’s because there’s no competition. That, however, is more of an indictment of the other prominent teams in the NCAA – who fail to rise to the challenge of a dominant team – than of the Huskies.
Ideally, the UConn women will eventually lift the standard of competition to their level instead of routinely occupying the vaunted space so far above everyone else.
The Huskies are winning because they have, in Auriemma, a dynamic coach who gets the best players then pushes them hard. Other programs will need to gain all three of those ingredients – or UConn will need to lose one or two of them – before the playing field levels off.
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