Question: What the fuck is a Mercado region? Or a Hemisfair region?

Clue: It becomes a little more apparent when you see the Alamo and River Walk regions.

Answer:  They are names that the NCAA has assigned to the regions of the women’s NCAA basketball tournament. Since the NCAA is all about money, the men’s branding of March Madness is sacrosanct above all. Soccer, for instance, has 64 teams in their NCAA tournament, but they can’t use the terms Sweet 16 or Final 4. So it should surprise no one that the women, who play basketball in March, can’t use the term March Madness either, nor can they use the simple West, East, South and Midwest regional designations.  Instead women’s regions get cutesy, Disneyfied names which, to be frank, is simply infantilizing.

Take a look at the NCAA’s official women’s bracket:

vis a vis the men’s bracket:

So here’s another question.  Why do the women have to “promote” San Antonio? Is it because they are really nothing more than glorified cheerleaders?

The stark inequities between how the NCAA values the men as opposed to the women was given its most eloquent expression in the now-viral tweet from Oregon’s Sedona Prince:

Let me put it on Twitter too cause this needs the attention pic.twitter.com/t0DWKL2YHR

— Sedona Prince (@sedonaprince_) March 19, 2021

This is, of course, egregious since it affects the ability of the women to play their games at their peak, but peel back the onion a couple of layers and we come to the ludicrous discussion of swag bags.  The men get better bags. The NCAA’s official statement is that the differences between the bags has to do with the weather.  Really.  That is the NCAA’s position. But pull another layer to that onion and we find that puzzles were included in both the men’s and women’s bags: the men got 500-piece puzzles while the women got 150-piece kiddie puzzles. Think about that for a second.  You know any really good puzzlers?  If you do, I bet she’s a woman. Puzzles are mundane and require attention, a combination most men, if you will allow me to generalize, are NOT able to handle.

The Washington Post’s excellent Sally Jenkins peels the NCAA onion back even further and calls it a shell game.  We’ll start with the obvious injustice. Ohio received $2 million dollars for beating Virginia this year in the Big Dance.  Whichever wondrous women’s team wins it all in San Antonio, be it Connecticut or Stanford or South Carolina or perhaps even Oregon, they will receive nothing. Zip. Not a fucking penny.

The NCAA claims that the women don’t make any money.  Zero.  Zip.  Zilch. Despite selling out 2019’s Final Four in Tampa – all the while charging market rate for tickets – and having all 63 tournament games on ESPN/ABC, NCAA president Mark Emmert continues to poormouth the women. Ratings are strong and growing for the women’s tourney and this year they get ESPN all to their own, while Virginia men’s hoops loyalists had to scramble once again to find Bennett and the Boys on something called TruTv.  Sally Jenkins lists many of the 77 advertisers who, in the midst of a pandemic, are shelling out their scarce advertising dollars to attract fans of the women’s game.

The NCAA insists that the women’s tournament “does not generate any net revenue.”  The following may be a pie-in-sky number, but independent analyst Daniel Rascher believes that the women generate $1 billion a year.  That’s $1,000,000,000. Of course, if the NCAA wanted to, it could open their financials and then we could see just how much the women make.  But the NCAA doesn’t want to do that, for as Jenkins explains:

The story the NCAA has long told to women’s basketball is this: It is a cost burden, a subsidized sport “that should feel lucky to be there,” Rascher says.  As long as the NCAA can make the women’s basketball tournament seem “net” poor, nobody will bother much about it, right? It makes it harder for women’s coaches to campaign for budgets and revenue shares, and for female stars such as Paige Bueckers to argue that they deserve to be paid. 

 To see the rank hypocrisy behind the NCAA, here is their mission statement:

To govern competition in a fair, safe, equitable and sportsmanlike manner, and to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount.

There is nothing equitable about how the women are treated and the paramount educational experience some of these women will take away is that they are being defrauded. The NCAA gets their ad revenues and fully packed Final Fours that the women deliver, and yet the women are expected to be joyous just for the “opportunity.”  I won’t link Sedona Prince’s subsequent tweet when the NCAA caved and made a decent weight room.  Prince’s joy is palpable, and I’m happy for her.  But it’s also kind of pathetic that the merest hint of equality could make a woman in the 21^st Century delirious.

I’m going to give the last word to Neena Chaudhry, a dear friend and Senior Advisor for Education at the National Woman’s Law Center.  She has the misfortune of being a Maryland grad, but we’re not going to hold that against her here at HoosPlace.

“Sadly, the NCAA’s discrimination against women is not new. But thanks to athletes, coaches, and advocates speaking out, it’s on full display during this tournament. Almost 50 years after the landmark civil rights law, Title IX, was passed to break down barriers for women and girls in education, schools and the association to which they give control over their athletics programs continue to treat women as second class. Our nation’s daughters deserve so much more.”

For my part, it has been a privilege to cover the women’s soccer program at Virginia.  These women have shed the same blood, sweat and tears as the men to advance to where they have.  And I think the Ginger Rogers Corollary applies:  women have to do it backwards and in heels. And when the calendar turns to basketball season, it has been a joy, and it’s been very easy, to hop aboard the Tony Bennett train.  We’ve won a national championship, five ACC regular season titles and a pair of ACC tournaments. It’s easy to write about that.  The women’s program, helmed by head coach Tina Thompson, is a dumpster fire, and when the season was cancelled in mid-January due to COVID concerns, it seemed more like a mercy killing.  But I will cover the team next year for HoosPlace because these women deserve their due.  They certainly aren’t going to get that from the suits in the NCAA.