re: UCONN women up 40 in their title game

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Is women's college basketball the sport most prone to total blowouts like this? And I'm not just talking about UConn. It seems to have the least amount of parity of any sport I can think of.

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Blowouts, yeah, but not to the magnitude. And in this particular game, in the NCAAT, a 1 seed did get upset by a 16 seed.

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Is women's college basketball the sport most prone to total blowouts like this? And I'm not just talking about UConn. It seems to have the least amount of parity of any sport I can think of.

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I have a theory behind this, and I think it's because of two main reasons:

1. Male phenotypes in physical traits tend to have a much flatter bell curve (and higher standard deviation). Ergo, you'll simply have many, many more men than women who are two or three standard deviations above median height (the ideal heights for elite basketball players), and thus, a much deeper natural pool of players from which to draw. Most D-1 women's teams have the requisite height (i.e., their centers are 6'3" to 6'5"), but they're all drawing from a pool that is about a fifth or a tenth as big as the men's pool of centers, and thus, can't be as discriminating when it comes to skill.

2. With that much smaller pool of players, volleyball tends to take a ton of the elite athletic talent that would otherwise gravitate towards women's basketball. It would be a deeper game without volleyball, but still not the competitiveness of men's.