AN INTERSECTIONAL DILEMMA.

Six thousand cable channels, and conflicting virtue signals on ESPN.

Game 4 of the WNBA Semifinals between the Washington Mystics and Atlanta Dream wasn’t viewable on television for more than 15 minutes of game action.

ESPN2 had a college football game between Prairie View A&M University and North Carolina Central University scheduled to start at noon Eastern, with the Mystics-Dream game scheduled for 3 p.m. Eastern.

Apparently, the timing is going to spoil the wokeness at a watch-party somewhere.

[T]oo much of the Twitter backlash to the football game being shown over the WNBA game was about the lack of importance of the game, or even the score/status of the game. HBCU schools deserve this airtime from ESPN, too. They are drastically under-covered in the sports world and ESPN should be praised for covering them in this setting.

If ESPN had left that game early — which many WNBA fans were asking them to do — then ESPN would be taking something away from an underserved fan base. As a WNBA community, what would your reaction been if they had done that to a WNBA game? It’s why I think ESPN did the right thing by staying with the football game until its conclusion.

Maybe a commentator can get away with that "undercovered" in a common room masquerading as a sports weblog, but in real life, there are limits to how much living at the expense of others a network can get away with.

I don’t envy ESPN in this position because I’m sure the financials indicate as much live sports content as possible and as little of the rest. I actually seem to be in the minority opinion that ESPN is a pretty solid broadcast partner to the WNBA, looking holistically.

But there were relatively easy steps that could’ve been taken to avoid this situation today (including putting these games on ABC) and ESPN didn’t do those. They deserve a fair amount of criticism for that, but that criticism should not need to come with slander of another sport’s coverage.

Perhaps it's all in the timing. The powers that be in men's basketball don't start the WNBA season until the [M]NBA championship is determined, whilst the powers that be in college football insist on these season openers before Labor Day. Just a few weeks ago, the major ESPN channels were covering the Little League World Series, for the boys and for the girls.  I have trouble with these kids (on the boy's side, you can see the outline of the man in some of the players, others still have their baby fat) getting walk-up music and profiles complete with favorite tunes and other stuff as if they're on a bubble-gum card.

On the other hand, put either the basketball playoff or this tilt between at best mid-majors on ABC and watch the ratings tank.