The Tennessee Lady Vols announced Saturday they were ending their basketball series with Siena. They offered no explanation.
Just kidding. The Lady Vols don't even have a series with Siena. But if they did, no one would care how they ended it.
They could announce it in an e-mail. Or put a press release in the mail.
That's how you end a series with Siena. That's not how you end a series with the University of Connecticut.
UConn athletic director Jeff Hathaway said Friday his school was notified by the Lady Vols that they were ending the series. UT athletic director Joan Cronan then issued a statement about ending the series but offered no explanation.
Worse yet, neither did UT coach Pat Summitt.
This is the biggest rivalry in women's basketball. Nothing else is close. Yet Summitt is ending it without comment.
Imagine Summitt assigning no one to guard Diana Taurasi in the Final Four, then offering no explanation in the postgame press conference. This makes even less sense.
The Lady Vols aren't just sticking it to UConn. They're sticking it to their own fans. Their three biggest home crowds have all come against UConn, the team UT fans love to beat.
Ending the series affects more than UT and UConn. It affects all of women's basketball. It affects the networks, too.
The Connecticut Post reported Saturday that next season's UT-UConn game in Knoxville would have served as the debut for women's basketball Game Day. The newspaper also quoted sources as saying Carol Stiff, ESPN's senior director of programming and acquisitions, flew to Knoxville and tried to get the Lady Vols to change their mind.
That's not farfetched. UConn vs. UT is a match-up in which the most casual sports fan has a sense of the rivalry.
The Lady Vols have won seven national championships in the last 21 years. The Huskies have won five in the last 13 years.
The Lady Vols had Chamique Holdsclaw, Bridgette Gordon and Tamika Catchings. They still have Candace Parker. The Huskies had Taurasi, Sue Bird and Rebecca Lobo.
In the last 15 years, UT and UConn have had the biggest-name players and the most dominant teams. The best women's team ever? It's a debate between the 39-0 Lady Vols of 1997-98 or the 39-0 Huskies of 2001-02.
Summitt is the No. 1 name in the sport. If she resigned tomorrow, UConn coach Geno Auriemma would be No. 1.
Back and forth they have gone for more than a decade. UT was on top, then UConn, and now UT again.
The only thing better than one UT-UConn regular-season game was two, which you had from 1999 through 2001. Two was too much for UT, which appeared to be running scared when it said it would only play the Huskies once a year.
The Lady Vols are now dealing from a position of strength. Not only have they won three consecutive games in the series, they won the national championship two months ago and will be favored to win another next season.
So why back out of a series that has meant so much to your program, your fans and your sport?
Speculation will center around the personality conflict between the head coaches or the heated recruitment of recent UConn signee Maya Moore, a player UT hoped to sign. But without further explanation, both issues seem trivial.
And without further explanation, the story won't go away. It will come up repeatedly and will be magnified if the teams meet in the NCAA tournament.
No one should understand that better than Summitt, who is as media savvy as anyone in the business. But she is dismissing the Huskies as casually as she might cancel a preseason game with the Houston Jaguars.
UConn deserves better than that. So does women's basketball.
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