Number one seed Stanford stunned by Ole Miss in NCAA tournament

For individuals who nonetheless maintain on fingertips to the argument that their the shortage of curiosity in ladies’s faculty basketball is because of a scarcity of Aggressive steadiness, simply let your self go and fall into the ocean of ​​unhealthy pictures. You may be part of the crowds who imagine that males’s faculty basketball is extra stable than the NBA and that stationary quarterbacks are more practical than cellular quarterbacks. Sadly for Tara VanDerveer and hers Stanford Cardinal, they have been, once more. the present to ship a giant chin upset that highlighted the energy of the competitors in ladies’s faculty basketball.

Coming into the 2023 event, Stanford was the #1 seed for the third straight season. This system gained a Nationwide Championship in 2021 and was within the Ultimate 4 final season. Nevertheless, on Sunday night time, Stanford’s 2023 run got here to a surprisingly abrupt finish. VanDerveer’s group was knocked out of the event within the second spherical by No. 8 seed Ole Miss, 54-49.

Stanford has been right here earlier than

This loss makes Stanford the one No. 1 seed to not advance to at the least sweet 16 since 2009. Additionally, whereas the Virginia males’s basketball group shocked America by being the No. 1 seed to lose to the No. 16 seed in 2017, the Stanford ladies’s basketball group was really the primary ever Division I basketball group. to endure that loss. In 1998, Stanford, reeling from damage, misplaced within the first spherical to Sixteenth-seeded Harvard.

When Geno Auriemma and Pat Summit coached dominant applications to a number of NCAA championships, there have been individuals who argued that the extent of dominance was not good for the game. Connecticut successful 90 straight video games over the course of three seasons was “boring,” although the UCLA males successful 88 straight within the early Nineteen Seventies was “legendary.” It is the lazy argument that haunts the fallacious facet.of-story made by resident Darren Rovell final March.

Buick aired a industrial highlighting the shortage of protection ladies’s faculty sports activities obtain in comparison with males’s. Rovell determined to rapidly publish her opinion on the matter. She posted the industrial in its entirety and added her ideas on why she believes the ladies’s Division I Event would not obtain the identical media protection as the lads’s.

Rovell tweeted this simply earlier than the beginning of the 2022 NCAA Basketball Tournaments. In 2021, three double digit seeds within the ladies’s event she gained their first spherical conferences. In the course of the first spherical of the ladies’s event after Rovell’s tweet, Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes have been two seeds, as they’re this season. Sadly for Iowa, she did not rating or help on 27 straight factors final season like she did on Sunday. In 2022, the Hawkeyes misplaced to Creighton within the second spherical. This season they’re heading to the Candy 16.

The truth that a extremely recruited participant like Clark selected to remain near residence and play in Iowa as a substitute of UConn, South Carolina, Notre Dame or Stanford, is proof that girls’s faculty basketball nowadays is much from a profession. which solely options a number of distinguished gamers. rivals.

March is a wild time in faculty basketball. In a pattern recreation, the next seed being bothered by a decrease seed is nearly all the time a sensible risk. For individuals who believed that Cinderella ignored the ladies’s recreation, here is a reminder from Stanford that not solely has it all the time been round, nevertheless it’s making its presence felt extra usually nowadays.

So, for individuals who do not care to look at ladies’s faculty basketball, you have been warned that the “lack of competitors” argument is bullshit. For individuals who do not like right this moment’s recreation and did not recognize UConn and Tennessee’s dominance of the previous, the issue is within the mirror. not on television