The Final Fours, women’s hoops on the ‘Gram, Rhys Hoskins’s hot start, and other thoughts

First and final thoughts …

Villanova’s law school held its annual sports symposium on Friday, and the panel discussions were loaded with power players: Eagles running back and ‘Nova alumnus Brian Westbrook; former Wildcats basketball star Randy Foye, now the president of Friends of ‘Nova, the university’s official NIL collective; Angelo Cataldi; Howard Eskin; Andrew Brandt; executives from the five major pro leagues. But based on the metric that might matter most to an elite athlete in the social-media age, the most popular and important figure wasn’t any of them.

When, as a high school recruit, Maddy Siegrist visited Villanova’s campus for the first time, she said Friday, she had one thought running through her mind: I hope they want me. That was 2018. The dynamic has reversed since. Now, because they’re getting paid and have the freedom to transfer pretty much whenever they wish, college athletes wield a measure of power they once didn’t. And in the world of basketball, the women have just about as much — and in some ways, more — than the men.

“Women, especially that top group, are not far behind,” said Siegrist, a forward with the WNBA’s Dallas Wings who last fall also accepted a job within Villanova’s athletic department in a role that allows her to focus primarily on funding and marketing. “It’s closer than you think.”

She was talking about the NIL dollars available to the top male players versus those available to the top female players. But if you’ve been paying any attention to the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournaments, you know that Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, JuJu Watkins, and the other stars have shifted the momentum of public interest toward the women. The Final Fours run from Friday through Monday, and the ratings promise to be comparable at a minimum.

“You can identify the stars in women’s basketball,” Siegrist said. “They have such a presence on social media.”

Bingo. A female college basketball player who has her sights set on the WNBA has to wait until she has turned or is about to turn 22, and she has to graduate or will graduate within three months of the WNBA draft. Those guidelines help ensure that female stars stay at the college level longer than standout male players do, and the women’s social-media followings often dwarf the men’s.

» READ MORE: Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Kim Mulkey, Dawn Staley: Women have taken over the NCAA tournament

Reese has 2.8 million followers on Instagram. Clark has 1.4 million. Bueckers has 1.2 million, and Watkins has 653,000. Meanwhile, Purdue’s Zach Edey, the men’s player of the year, has roughly 76,400. (Just less than 56% of all Instagram users in the United States are female.) Even Siegrist’s comparatively modest following of 20,400 on the ‘Gram is more than Eric Dixon’s (12,200) and nearly as high as Justin Moore’s (21,600). This has been a grass-roots revolution in women’s hoops.

“They’re taking advantage of every single opportunity,” said Foye, who has three daughters and said that he rushed home last Monday night to watch Iowa-LSU in the Elite Eight. “The men have been working like this for so long because they’ve been raising so much revenue in the NCAA Tournament. With the way the women are operating, with their social-media platforms, being outspoken — look at JuJu being in a commercial with Joel Embiid — with the way they’re executing off their corporate sponsorships, I haven’t seen anything like this.”

Until the Phillies unveiled their “City Connect” jerseys Friday — turquoise, with yellow lettering — I had no idea there was such nostalgia around here for the 1984 Seattle Mariners.

Rhys Hoskins is off to a fine start for the Milwaukee Brewers, with two home runs and a 1.076 on-base-plus-slugging percentage over his first 17 at-bats. But anyone second-guessing the Phillies for letting him walk away has to ask themselves: Because Major League Baseball increased the importance of defense by banning shifts, how much damage would the Phils have done to themselves in having an everyday lineup that fielded so poorly?

Think about it: If Hoskins were still here, he could be the designated hitter or bring his below-average glove back to first base. Either way, Kyle Schwarber would have to go back to left field, which would push Brandon Marsh to center, which would boot Johan Rojas or Christian Pache out of the lineup entirely, which sounds fine until you remember how bad the Phillies defense was in 2022 and how productive they had to be on offense to overcome it.

The shift thing is real; the Phillies made a point of trying to get more athletic up the middle, with Rojas in center, with Trea Turner at shortstop, with Bryson Stott at second. Yes, Rojas isn’t hitting, and Turner isn’t fielding, but it’s early yet. Too early to lament that the Phillies let Hoskins walk away.