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Bill Burr had a good take on this one. Basically, how many of the people complaining about the pay disparity in women’s basketball actually watch women’s basketball? If you want them to get paid more, you need to watch their sport so they will bring in higher ticket sales and ad revenues. His take is a lot women are complaining about this pay disparity and few of them actually even watch the WNBA, so it’s kind of hypocritical since they’re not doing the very thing that would help increase their salaries.

Hey that's about what most engineers graduating from college get. And they won't be able to do sponsorships and ad deals. I would say $76k is a much more appropriate salary to start with than what the men make in basketball. That is just crazy

Women’s basketball has soared in popularity in recent years, with this year’s March Madness tournament dwarfing its men’s counterpart. There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of them is that the game is just fun to watch.

This should result in more media money, which should result in higher salaries. We'll see. Football really does suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room, financially speaking.

Another part of the discussion is that popularity is sort of meeting in the middle, since as women's basketball rises, men's college basketball has been gutted by (among other things) stars leaving after one year, as well as court-forced rule changes (completely reasonable, IMHO, because players should get agency) that have everyone else playing musical chairs as they switch schools to pursue their financial and athletic dreams rather than buckle down to get a degree, which is often nerfed anyway.

College athletics in general, and "revenue sports" in particular, try to meet the letter of the "Student Athlete" rules without giving a single shit about graduating players who have the same level of mastery and accountability as even a garden variety liberal arts major. It's not really a new thing, either. I muddled my way through an English degree, learning study skills as I went, and while I'm under no delusions that meeting the minimum standards was as hard as it would have been in an engineering program, there weren't exactly any athletes in my classes on Elizabethan Drama or the History of the English Language, either.

.....and millions in sponsorship deals

Damn. You can’t force higher wages if the revenue isn’t coming in though. Maybe make a mixed gender league with co-ed teams.

It's up to us to keep watching the WNBA to keep their salaries raising

The world will be just fine when we stop worshiping athletes. Hopefully this news turns more people off to it.