I-80 Football Show: To Grow or Not to Grow, That’s the Question

04.26.2024 - By FFSN Play

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Welcome to a new episode of Land-Grant Podcast Network’s I-80 Football Show. On this show, we travel down I-80 to talk about all things Big Ten Football. This is the only Big Ten Podcast that’ll cover all 18 teams. After every week of action, we will catch you up on all the conference’s games and look ahead at the matchups, storylines, and players you should be paying attention to for the next week. My name is Jordan Williams, and I am joined by my co-host Dante Morgan.

For years we’ve been lied to about women’s sports. The line was that investing in women’s sports was bad business because no one watched women’s sports. Despite the success of the USWNT, they were making less than the men and there was no support for a US-based women’s professional league despite their being a men’s league that had a lot less success nationally. Now they can’t tell this lie anymore as the past few years have shown that people watch women’s sports and it is good business to invest, they just didn’t believe in women’s sports.

In the past few years, Women’s basketball has been on the rise and it has officially exploded due to stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. This year’s March Madness was run by the women with the women’s tournament outselling the men and significantly outperforming them in television ratings. We are finally starting to get invested in Women’s sports as people begin to realize there is always good if not better play in women’s sports. There just was an intentional decision not to sport them by execs, businesses, television companies, and marketing firms. Truthfully, there has also been a lack of investment from WNBA leadership at times.

In this episode, Dante, Jordan, and our guest DaNaysia have a passionate discussion about the future of the WNBA and women’s sports. While facing this major boom of interest in the sport the WNBA must capitalize on the interest and turn people into long term fans. One of the biggest concerns facing the WNBA is the lack of teams and roster spots which does not allow for many college stars to make the team. We all agree that the WNBA needs to expand, and Jordan believes expansion is the first step to creating a more sustainable product and capitalizing on the interest. Dante believes the WNBA needs to fix its internal issues first and that expanding without doing that is bad business.