Still Want to Watch Basketball? College Coaches Know Where to Look

“I don’t remember any other plays in that game,” he said, “but I remember that one.”

Kim Mulkey, No. 3 Baylor

2005, 2012 and 2019 national champion, and 2020 Big 12 regular-season champion

What she’d watch: Not a game but the HBO documentary, “Women of Troy,” featuring Cheryl Miller and the great Southern California women’s teams that won N.C.A.A. women’s titles in 1983 and 1984.

Why she’d watch: The documentary captures the advent of women’s N.C.A.A. women’s basketball. The first men’s N.C.A.A. tournament was held in 1939, but the association did not sponsor a tournament for women until 1982, a full decade after the passage of Title IX, the federal law that prohibited discrimination based on gender. Until then, the women’s tournament had been facilitated by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.

Miller, from Riverside, Calif., was perhaps the first superstar in women’s college basketball. This was an era long before the W.N.B.A., when CBS was obligated to put women’s basketball on television so it could secure the rights to air men’s basketball. But the women’s game featured seminal players like Mulkey, Nancy Lieberman and Ann Meyers. At U.S.C., Miller, along with twin teammates Pam and Paula McGee, and Cynthia Cooper, played with verve and flair that, according to The Los Angeles Times, “mirrored what the Showtime Lakers were doing across the city.”

“The more people can learn about the players who came before the players today, the better it is,” said Mulkey, who also won national titles as a player for Louisiana Tech in 1981 and 1982. (The first was in the A.I.A.W. tournament, and the second came in the inaugural N.C.A.A. women’s tournament.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/sports/ncaabasketball/best-college-basketball-games.html