Why doesn't Geno Auriemma get the same respect at John Wooden? Because he coaches women?

… may win its 100th consecutive victory 

His team is on the verge of its 100th consecutive victory that could come tonight. He has won 11 national titles. He has transformed a program that had only one winning season before he arrived into the dominant one in the game. He has had only one losing season in 31 years. He is one season away from winning 1,000 games. His teams have lost only one game in the past four seasons. His teams have won four consecutive national championships and six of the past eight. He has won 979 games while losing just 134, a winning percentage of almost 88 percent.

Those are incredible stats.

Yet, at times, Geno Auriemma must feel like Rodney Dangerfield, the woeful character who also bemoaned the fact that he was born a loser and "gets no respect."

In fact, followers of men's basketball tend to demean the University of Connecticut women's basketball coach's accomplishments. When others try to compare him to the greatest college men's coach, John Wooden of UCLA, they simply laugh at the comparison.

Why?

Is this sexism? Granted, women cannot run as fast as men, they cannot jump as high as men, and they cannot dunk with the same regularity as men do.

However, they still play with a round basketball and score in the same way as men do. The team with the highest number of points still wins the game, just like the men do. They have five players on their teams, just like the men do. They play offense and defense, just like the men do. And the coaches recruit the best high school players in the country, just like men's coaches do.

Yet, Geno, with his 11 national titles, is not placed in the same category as John Wooden, who has 10.

Why is that?

SI analysis

Last year, after Auriemma won his 11th national title with a win over Syracuse, Sports Illustrated did a comparison of the UCLA program of the 1960s and the UConn program of Auriemma's years.

The first complaint about UConn is that they win by such large margins. Indeed, there is less parity in women's basketball than in men's.

However, as SI noted, "Critics of UConn's dominance point to the Huskies' typically large margin of victory. But UCLA's margin of victory was also high: Though the Bruins never won 75 consecutive games by double digits, like UConn, UCLA's 30 straight tournament wins from 1967 to 1974 included 24 double–digit wins."

They also note that when Wooden was coaching, only 25 teams made the NCAA tournament, and they were just the ones that won the conference tournament. That eliminated teams that may have lost in the conference tournament, like second-ranked Southern Cal in 1971 which lost to UCLA is the Pac-10 tournament and did not make the NCAAs.

SI also notes that few teams were dominant in the Wooden years. "In early men's college basketball, talent was not spread out as it is in today's game, which partially explains how the Bruins managed to have enough talent to earn an AP preseason No. 1 ranking eight times from 1965 to 1975."

Recruiting coups

Wooden and Auriemma both had one similarity in a recruiting coup. Wooden has noted in interviews that the player who made his program was Lew Alcindor, now known as Kareen Abdul-Jabbar. The 7-2 center was the top recruit in the country in 1966, and his traveling from New York to L.A. gave Wooden the credibility and the talent to put together his streak of 10 national titles.

For Auriemma, it was also a big post player, Rebecca Lobo, a 6-4 player from Massachusetts who helped lead the Lady Huskies to their first national title in 1995.

Since then, Auriemma has dominated college recruiting, and today, the players flock to him, just like they did to UCLA during the Wooden era.

UConn dominance damaging?

Some complain that UConn's dominance has hurt the college game. “UConn's still going to be out in front as long as Geno keeps getting the best players and developing the best players. It's a credit to them, but it's still not helping the women's game,” EPSN reporter David Ubben told National Public Radio.

That should not be held against Auriemma, just as it was not against Wooden. They recruited the best players, and they made great players out of them.

Wooden inherited good program, Geno not so much

One major difference between the two programs and men is that Wooden inherited a good UCLA program and made it great. Auriemma inherited a program that was in its infancy and built it from the ground up.

That is definitely something to be proud of today.

Conclusion

Quite simply, Geno Auriemma is a great coach, a man who immigrated to the U.S. when he was seven and settled in Norristown, Pa. He worked his way up the ranks to take a job coaching a team that had just started its women's basketball program, and developed it into the premier one in the 21st Century.

I will not compare the two men since they coached at different times in different sports. However, they are both great. Of that, no one can differ.