The 2024 Paris Olympics is behind us, but the television ratings were better than the 2021 (postponed from 2020 due to COVID) games in Tokyo. Women’s basketball, specifically Team USA’s games, average 7.8 million viewers, no noticeable change between the two sets televised games in 2021 and this summer.
I believe adding Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese to the women’s basketball team would have improved the TV ratings. Their exclusion, something I originally and grudgingly understood, is a symptom of how the WNBA and USA Basketball are managed.
I have a situational management style. USA Basketball apparently doesn’t.
Team missed an uncontested open shot. USA believed there were factors keeping Clark and Reese off the team:
Little-to-no rest from their collegiate basketball seasons into professional play at a more rigorous travel and practice level, and already having a team solidly set who knew the game plan to the level of memory motion.
These reasons cost them television ratings, and maybe cost them some serious merchandising dollars.
When I want to evaluate the business sense among professional sports, I lean toward the conventional wisdom with just the right blend of comfort with ambiguity the NFL has. No one runs a sports business the way the Shield runs a sports business.
USA Basketball, purist in their thought process, forgot women’s basketball was getting hotter this summer before the Olympic break. Are they too stodgy to realize if they view their sport as a television product, opportunities for even greater ratings would exist?
Team USA had to fight to the finish for its gold medal in a contest I could not set aside time to watch. Clark and Reese were playing well enough in the WNBA to get out of the staffing dogma used to put the 2024 Olympic team together.
I strongly believe the addition of Clark and Reese to the mix would have afforded team USA to get more viewers for their games, but there they sat – FLAT – in ratings from the prior games in 2021.
Look, I’ll be even more abstract about this.
I was a huge fan of Indie artists in the 1990s, but artists like Liz Phair (a fellow Buckeye who made her bones in Chicago), and Henry Rollins – aka Rollins of the punk band Black Flag, and a solo performer who also held spoken word events – had something to say about the purists in their genre who viewed themselves as progressive.
Phair and Rollins noted these people were some of the most narrow-minded people they ever met.
They were right.
When I lived in Southern Oklahoma and spent many a weekend among clubs in Wichita Falls, Texas, the Lower Greenville crowd in Dallas, and Indie people in Austin I knew firsthand why Phair and Rollins called them narrow-minded.
It was both an incredibly fun time in my life, and it was quite easy to avoid the trappings other people get lured into by the extensive time spent in clubs. I was a good boy. I balanced this with a very successful, award-garnering active-duty military service in a very by-the-book manner, including some post show hangouts with a handful of bands.
Hip as they were in an emerging genre, these folks had contempt for successful bands and other individuals who broke out from their close circles. Tripping Daisy and dada are bands who come to mind making their bones in Northern Texas at the time, were experiencing some of this commercial success, too, and I thought people’s comments about this success were kind of insulting.
Furthermore, I also heard from people on the scene that I was a sell-out with my steady paycheck and its benefits associated with military service. It wasn’t unusual to hear someone say, “What are you doing here? You don’t belong here. You’re proof that these guys are sellouts with people like you around.”

Circa 1992-1993, I wasn’t worried about the ability to physically defend myself among most of these people either, and I would say something like, “The more exposure and success these people get, lalapalooza will look less like ‘dollop-of-losers.’ It’s win-win people!”
These days, you’ve likely seen through feedback among your Gen-Z kids, how much commercialism improved the quality and security of lalapalooza. ‘Nuff said.
Indie rockers and their community wanted to hold onto very insular thinking and to keep their community exclusive, so I look at these most recent comparative TV ratings and ask USA Basketball’s women’s team management, “what the hell were you thinking?”
Women’s basketball was riding a hot streak until the 2024 Summer Olympics because of insular, dogmatic thinking of putting together a basketball squad.
Look at the men’s team comparatively.
They peppered their squad with the Geritol Set (in relative terms only - LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant) and the youth movement (e.g., Antony Edwards – one of the most compelling hoopsters I’ve seen in recent years). The women’s team could have done the same.
The O’ Jays song in 1975, (Got to) Give The People What They Want, rings true today.
If you can’t give the people… then stop bellyaching about salaries when you’ve missed shots at capitalizing on opportunities of a better revenue stream. Sell out, instead, and let some folks like NFL execs sit in your conference rooms, and “learn ya somethin’.”