One more cup of coffee

Athletes? Yeah, but check out those swimsuit models!

As a graduate of the University of Tennessee, I've always appreciated Women's College Basketball. I've never gotten into basketball that much, but I always liked the Lady Vols. Unlike the men's team, who, when I was a student, sucked in all categories, the women managed to consistently win games and actually graduate. It was the 49ers who claimed the slogan 'winning with class', but I always thought it should apply to the Lady Vols.

After watching my beloved team play tonight, beating BYU to advance to the 'Elite 8' (when did someone invent that term?), I looked to CNNSI.com for news. I managed to load the page at just the right time in the ad rotation to see all three of the main banner ads hawking products based on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.

This wouldn't be quite so bad if it weren't for the fact that CNN/SI's coverage of women's basketball is awful. It's not that I object to the existence of the swimsuit edition. Rather, it's to the fact that the swimsuit models are the most prominent placement of women on even the pages devoted to women's basketball. Every day, on the main CNN.com home page, as well as the CNN/SI page, there are headlines about the men's tournament. When I've looked, there has frequently been no mention of even the existence of the women's tournament, much less any news about it.

When the brackets for both tournaments was announced, CNN had easy to find links to pages about the seedings, links to printable brackets, and articles about the pending matchups. For the men. Click on the link for Women's Basketball, and you got a sterile looking page with no articles, no pictures, and links only for the scheduling information for the season that had just finished. Want to see the brackets? Too bad. (The information is up now, but the page still looks like crap. Frankly, the swimsuit ads were about the only notable visual element on the page.)

There's some hope, though. ESPN's women's basketball page appears to have actually had some design put into it. Pictures -- of the athletes, not swimsuit models -- appear, as well as numerous articles about the sport. And they had link's to the women's brackets the very first time I looked.

 

Posted by Mike at March 23, 2002 11:21 PM