Author: Jack McHenry (Sports Columnist)
A perfect season is a rare feat in sports. Oftentimes the NCAA football champion is undefeated, but even that is not always a given. Aside from that, undefeated teams in major sports are legendary and readily identifiable to sports fans as timeless teams often coached by all-time greats. Don Shula’s 1972 Dolphins. The Wooden era UCLA teams. Knight’s 1976 Hoosiers, which were the last NCAA men’s team to go undefeated, and even across the pond, Thierry Henry’s 2004 “Invincibles” at Arsenal. The only sport in which sports fans are given a semi-regular glimpse into perfection is NCAA women’s hoops. Since 1982, Texas, Tennessee and UConn, which has had four perfect seasons, have passed through the gauntlet of an NCAA season without any defeats. The Baylor Lady Bears can now add their names to that list and bring in a new corollary of their own-they are the only NCAA basketball team, men’s or women’s, to have a 40-0 season.
Baylor’s 40-0 season is an achievement earned in an era of intense sports journalism, which makes their undefeated season all the more impressive. The team had to remain composed and effective under tremendous media scrutiny. Take some of the aforementioned teams. The 1972 Dolphins and 1976 Hoosier championships in their respective sports were timeless accomplishments and incredible stories at the time they were won, but the exposure between an NFL or NBA team from the 1970’s versus an NCAA women’s basketball team in 2012 is simply incomparable. There was no ESPN in the 1970’s as cable TV was in its most infant stages and the internet was a far off, technological fantasy. The media coverage that a team receives now compared to then, as well as the accessibility for the public to that reporting, is an abstract comparison that almost cannot be made due to advances in technology.
Comparisons in media exposure get more interesting when comparing the 2012 Baylor team with some of their more recent contemporaries. Take the Undefeated 2002 UConn women’s team. That team had significant media exposure from newspapers, various magazines, a well developed internet journalism and ESPN. But 2002 was a year when the term “56k dial up” was not a joke, and people still hung out at that one friend’s house because he had cable and they didn’t. While those factors definitely constitute a difference in how a sports team is covered in the media and perceived by the public, the biggest difference ten years makes when comparing the coverage of the 2012 Baylor women with the 2002 UConn women is social media. In 2002, no one was on Twitter. No one was on Facebook, no one was even on Myspace. Maybe people had a Xanga if they were really sticking their necks out but that was it. In terms of sports, consider how much information is shared over social media. People link each other articles and post videos for one another when an athlete makes a mind blowing play or an incredibly boneheaded one. The readily available information flying through cyberspace equals increased exposure and pressure on athletes. The pressure has even increased since 2010, the last UConn team to go undefeated with the addition of Twitter and more rapid information exchange.
Even between the UConn teams that had back to back undefeated seasons in 2009 and 2010 and the 2012 Baylor team, Twitter magnifies the exposure of sports much more now than it did two years ago. ESPN has programming specifically created to interact with and involve social media, specifically Twitter. Thus information is shared more broadly and at a faster pace, so the news about Baylor spreads faster and to a larger audience. ESPN can share insider information about a team, or someone can tweet that they saw a player out at a party. This information is then circulated through Twitter, recovered by larger media outlets and re-reported. The information age builds the pressure placed on a team. Players probably have Twitter. They know what is being said about them and their team. It is a matter of their mental toughness to withstand the barrage from reporters on their senses. With reporters showing up at practice every day and millions of people swapping information via social media the pressure can break a team.
In the NFL, the Steelers were upset by the Broncos in the midst of a media frenzy revolving around Tim Tebow, placing a burden upon the Steelers to defeat the apparently inept quarterback. They choked. The same is true for the 2012 Green Bay Packers. The media swarmed a team that many people thought would be unbeatable in the playoffs. However, they lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Giants. With more people having access to the media and players becoming heavily involved with social media, the boundaries between fan, media and athlete become less defined, and the mental effects of the press become more apparent. And yet, the young women at Baylor were able to put the distractions aside, focus on basketball and navigate the season flawlessly.
The X-factor in all these calculations is that the Baylor team, like all NCAA teams, is composed of a small group of talented 18 to 22 year olds. A lot goes on at that point in someone’s life. College years are tumultuous. Exams, relationships, parties on the weekends, sports practice and the full gamut of activities take a huge toll on these players lives. Combine that with the potential emotional combustibility of anyone aged 18 to 22 and then put them under the intense microscope of 24/7 sports media coverage, and you get the recipe for some potentially volatile, crazy stories. Yet, Baylor was perfect. In this day and age, that is no small feat.
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