Football is the reason Texas and Oklahoma want to join the SEC, but they’ll be bringing other sports to the table. What will expansion mean for women’s basketball?
The first thing that crossed the minds of most women’s basketball fans was probably, “Vic Schaefer thought he was out and Dawn Staley pulls him back in.” Renewing the Schaefer-Staley rivalry, which was the best in the country for about five years (albeit at different programs), is the most tantalizing aspect of expansion. For Gamecock fans who are convinced Schaefer left Mississippi State because he didn’t want to compete with Staley anymore, it is especially exciting (for the record, I don’t share that belief).
Texas is the proverbial sleeping giant. The Longhorns should be a championship contender in every sport they sponsors, and women’s basketball is no exception. They have played in three Final Fours and won a national championship in 1986. The Longhorns were a traditional power that have backslid, not quite into mediocrity like the football or men’s basketball programs, but definitely a few levels removed from competing for Final Fours. Enter Schaefer, the Texas native who turned the Bulldogs into any unlikely power. Last year the Longhorns overachieved in Schaefer’s first season and he has already grabbed some big names in recruiting. If Schaefer can’t turn the Longhorns into a contender… well that would be pretty Texas wouldn’t it?
Oklahoma doesn’t quite have the same tradition as Texas, but it does have more recent success. The Sooners made the Final Four in 2002 and then in 2009 and 2010, led in the latter two by Courtney Paris, who still holds the NCAA record for consecutive double-doubles. But the Sooners weren’t able to maintain that level of success (they never seemed to recover from letting the Gamecocks swipe Ashley Bruner out of their backyard). Things got ugly last year when longtime coach Sherri Coale was accused of racially insensitive behavior by several former players. Other players supported Coale, but she retired following last season. The Sooners hired former Drake head coach Jennie Baranczyk to take over. Baranczyk’s staff includes former Texas A&M assistant Amy Wright and former Arkansas assistant Chantel Osahor, so there is plenty of familiarity with the SEC.
Both programs should, at least, enhance the SEC’s reputation as one of the deepest conferences in the country. And if Texas can realize its potential and Kim Mulkey can turn LSU around, the top tier could be the best in the country as well. Baranczyk doesn’t have the same track record as Schaefer or Mulkey, but she has won a lot of games as a mid-major. In the immediate future, South Carolina would still sit atop the league. The SEC’s challenging upper-middle class (From Texas A&M to Mississippi State to Tennessee to Georgia) would get bigger, and there will be a lot more teams like 2021 Arkansas, who got beaten up in league play but did the beating up out of conference. The schools that have struggled to win (Florida, Vanderbilt, Missouri) would face an even harder climb.
The current conference schedule is 16 conference games with no divisions. Each team has a permanent “rival” that they play twice each season (South Carolina and Kentucky are paired). Then there are two additional rotating home and homes, and each team faces the rest of the league once. It would make sense that Texas and Oklahoma would be permanent rivals. Then the SEC would be faced with a decision: go to 18 league games; stay at 16 and do away with the rotating home and homes; or stay at 16 games and each team would miss out on two teams each season. The last seems the least likely.
There are pros and cons to the other two. Adding two conference games would require subtracting two non-conference games. Coaches really like those non-conference games, whether it’s South Carolina playing top five opponents for tournament seeding or Vanderbilt playing East Tennessee State for a needed win. They would still figure out a way to make it happen, but it would make the annual South Carolina-UConn game tougher to schedule. The schedule is already imperfect (I’m thinking of Arkansas in 2019-20, when the Razorbacks lost eight games, but three to South Carolina), so it’s not as though the SEC is losing a perfect system.
All together, for women’s basketball there aren’t really any negatives. Texas and Oklahoma won’t damage the SEC’s reputation, and if Texas lives up to expectations the Longhorns should enhance it. There’s the return of a really fun rivalry in Texas-South Carolina, plus natural rivalries in Texas-Texas A&M (Schaefer vs mentor Gary Blair), Texas-Mississippi State (Schaefer vs the school he spurned), and Texas-LSU (Kim Mulkey). Plus, Texas still hasn’t scored on South Carolina since the third quarter.
