NCAA president pushes back on Geno Auriemma criticism of women's tournament format

PHOENIX — A season ago, LSU's Kim Mulkey and Vic Schaefer of Texas both took aim at the NCAA for its double-regional format in thewomen's basketball tournament. This year, the loudest critic has beenUConn coach Geno Auriemma.

The winner of 12 national championships has argued that shrinking the regional sites from four to two has negatively impacted the experience of the players. Before 2023, the women's tournament operated like the men's for the regional rounds; the 16 remaining teams were split up into four regional sites in different corners of the country. Now, just two sites host eight teams apiece, which has created unorthodox and truncated times for practices, shootarounds and media obligations.

"Does anybody who makes these decisions ever ask the coaches and the players, hey, does this work? Do you guys do this during the regular season? Is this normal? … I just don't understand some of the decisions that are made about our game when we're trying to grow the goddamn game," Auriemma said last weekend in Fort Worth, Texas. "I think there is a level of frustration right now among the coaches that's higher than any time I've ever seen it."

The Final Four matchup between South Carolina and UConn was played with intensity throughout, with emotions building as the game reached its closing stretch.

That tension surfaced late as the outcome was decided, leading to visible reactions and an exchange between two of women's basketball's most prominent coaches.

Above, UConn Huskies head coach Geno Auriemma and South Carolina Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley react during the second half of the 2026 Women's Final Four semifinal at Mortgage Matchup Center.

" style="max-width:100%; height:auto; border-radius:6px; margin:10px 0;" loading="lazy" /> Head coach Dawn Staley of the South Carolina Gamecocks and head coach Geno Auriemma of the UConn Huskies exchange words during the fourth quarter in the Final Four of the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament at Mortgage Matchup Center on April 03, 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Dawn Staley and Geno Auriemma bring intensity to SC‑UConn. See photos

The Final Four matchup between South Carolina and UConn was played with intensity throughout, withemotions building as the game reached its closing stretch.That tension surfaced late as the outcome was decided, leading to visible reactions and an exchange between two of women's basketball's most prominent coaches.Above, UConn Huskies head coach Geno Auriemma and South Carolina Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley react during the second half of the 2026 Women's Final Four semifinal at Mortgage Matchup Center.

But NCAA President Charlie Baker would urge detractors of the shift in format to look at the data. And indeed, the total attendance for this year's regional rounds was 78,475 — ranked as the fourth-highest ever. That figure is about 16,000 greater than the number of fans that attended the final season of the four-regional format in 2022, and about 12,000 more than 2019's figure.

During an impromptu media scrum with reporters at the Mortgage Matchup Center on Friday, Baker continued to defend the double-regional format.

"The one big thing that the basketball committee has always said is they want the experience for the kids in the arena to be loud, boisterous, enthusiastic and full and bigger," Baker said. "And if you look at all the data — the ticket data, the attendance data, the viewership data — it's all gone up dramatically over the past few years."

Ticket sales and total revenue for the Women's NCAA Tournament reached $4.4 million this year, the highest total ever, according to data provided by the NCAA. And as Baker said, viewership continues to be up, too. Elite Eight games between UConn and Notre Dame, Duke and UCLA, and TCU and South Carolina this season ranked inside the top 10 of the most-watched regional finals ever, each eclipsing 2.7 million viewers.

"The committee will go back and take a look at all the stuff that was raised around all of those issues and make decisions about what they do going forward, but it's pretty hard to argue when attendance is up, viewership's up, and ticket sales are up consistently year over year, that this formula isn't working," Baker said. "I understand the issue around the scheduling, and that's something I think the committee will take a good hard look at."

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More:Geno Auriemma embarrasses self, UConn with Dawn Staley tiff | Opinion

Regionals this year were held in Fort Worth, Texas, and Sacramento, California. The NCAA already has its regional sites booked for the next two years, with Philadelphia and Las Vegas hosting games in 2027, and Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon, hosting in 2028.

This is also the second year for units for the Women's NCAA Tournament, which means teams that make March Madness and win games in it earn money for their school and program. This year, one unit is worth a little more than $113,000.

Those units are primarily funded by the NCAA's media rights deal with ESPN. The newest agreement between the NCAA and ESPN began in 2024, an eight-year deal for 40 championships that values the women's tournament at $65 million per year.

When asked Thursday if the women's tournament could be spun off into its own singular deal — like the men's basketball tournament is — Baker expressed optimism in that change.

"I would really like to see us be able to come up with something other than the status quo on that," Baker said. "And I made that pretty clear to our media partners pretty much since I got the job."

Whether it's the media rights deal, changing the regional format or selecting which referees are chosen for the Final Four, UCLA head coach Cori Close simply wants coaches to have a voice in making those decisions.

"I do think when you have balanced representation in decision-making bodies, you usually end up in a better place. I think it would be wise if we took a step back. Where are we? How are our structures working? What adjustments need to be made to just enhance it? You get in trouble when you make big swell swoops," said Close, a former president of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association. "If there's something that doesn't have transparency in how the process goes, if it doesn't have principled things that you can go back to … I do think there's some adjustments to be made."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Charlie Baker hits back at criticism of Women's NCAA Tournament format

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April 03, 2026

NCAA president pushes back on Geno Auriemma criticism of women's tournament format

PHOENIX — A season ago, LSU's Kim Mulkey and Vic Schaefer of Texas both took aim at the NCAA for its double-regional ...

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Alvarez hits 2 homers and Mets bust out at the plate to back McLean in 10-3 blowout of Giants

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Francisco Alvarez homered twice and rookie Nolan McLean retired his first 15 batters as the New York Mets snapped a three-game skid Friday night with a 10-3 rout of the San Francisco Giants.

Mets Giants Baseball

Bo Bichette and Marcus Semien each had three of New York's season-high 15 hits after the Mets totaled only three runs in their previous three games. Mark Vientos reached base safely four times, but sluggerJuan Soto exited early with right calf tightness.

Soto will have imaging done Saturday, manager Carlos Mendoza said.

Semien launched his first homer for the Mets and drove in three runs. Bichette opened the scoring with an RBI single in the first.

McLean (1-0) took a perfect game into the sixth before walking Harrison Bader and Patrick Bailey to begin the inning. Jerar Encarnacion flied out to right field, but Willy Adames doubled to right-center to bring home Bader and end McLean's night.

The right-hander was charged with two runs (one earned). He struck out four. Four relievers combined to finish a five-hitter.

Run-scoring singles by Bichette and Semien off Tyler Mahle (0-2) gave the Mets a 2-0 lead in the first.

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Semien drilled a two-run homer to center off Mahle in the fourth. One out later, Alvarez also took Mahle deep to center.

Alvarez led off the Mets' three-run seventh with a homer to left off JT Brubaker, giving the catcher three home runs this season and six career multihomer games.

Soto singled in the first and appeared to slow up while running from first to third on Bichette's RBI single. He was forced out at home when Brett Baty grounded into a 1-2-3 double play, and Tyrone Taylor replaced Soto in left field for the bottom of the inning.

The 27-year-old Soto has hit safely in all eight games this season. He's in the second season of a record $765 million, 15-year contract with the Mets. He had 43 homers and 105 RBIs last season.

Up next

Mets RHP Clay Holmes (1-0) faces Giants RHP Landen Roupp on Saturday night.

AP MLB:https://apnews.com/hub/MLB

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April 03, 2026

Alvarez hits 2 homers and Mets bust out at the plate to back McLean in 10-3 blowout of Giants

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Francisco Alvarez homered twice and rookie Nolan McLean retired his first 15 batters as the New York...

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Report: NCAA Tournament expansion to 76 will be finalized after Final Four

NCAA's leadership and basketball committees are expected to finalize expansion of the men's and women's NCAA Tournaments to 76 teams shortly after the conclusion of this year's tournament, Yahoo Sports reported on Friday.

Per the report, the new format would see 52 teams earn berths directly into what is currently the first round of the NCAA Tournament, while the remaining 24 -- 12 lower-seeded automatic qualifiers and the final 12 at-large teams -- would play 12 opening-round games Tuesday and Wednesday. They would be held in the longtime First Four home of Dayton, Ohio, and at an additional site to determine which teams would advance to Thursday and Friday's first round.

However, these details could also reportedly change as the NCAA continues to talk with its men's tournament TV partners in Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS, which have broadcasting rights through the 2031 tournament.

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The report didn't indicate how quickly expansion could be added, but it could theoretically come as soon as the 2027 NCAA Tournaments. But expansion "will happen" barring something unforeseen in the next few days.

It would mark the first expansion of the tournament since the field moved from 65 to 68 teams with the addition of the First Four games in 2011. The field had been 64 or 65 teams since 1985.

The Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference were the leading voices behind tournament expansion, according to the report. However, it's also something that NCAA president Charlie Baker has said he's in favor of doing.

--Field Level Media

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April 03, 2026

Report: NCAA Tournament expansion to 76 will be finalized after Final Four

NCAA's leadership and basketball committees are expected to finalize expansion of the men's and women's NC...

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As Trump orders UFO data released, a question hangs: If aliens exist, what would they think of us?

For generations, human beings have wondered: What would alien life from another planet be like? But we rarely ask the opposite: What would they think of us?

What on Earth

It's a question that can produce some, well, uncomfortable answers if you happen to be an earthling.

"If I were looking at Earth from a distance, I would be pretty disappointed," theoretical physicist Avi Loeb says. "Most of our investing is dealing with conflicts to prevent other people from killing us or us killing others. Look at the Ukraine war over a little bit of territory. That is not a sign of intelligence."

The debate on whether little green men or UFOs are among us escalated in February when former President Barack Obama, responding to a podcaster's question, said aliens are "real," but he "hasn't seen them" and "they're not being kept at Area 51." President Donald Trump laterannounced on social mediathat he was directing release of government files because of "tremendous interest."

Stepped-up interest in UFOs also is swirling as the United States heads back toward the moon with Wednesday's launch ofNASA's Artemis IImission. The four astronauts aboard will do a fly-around of the moon before returning to Earth.

In a world riven by war, civil unrest, climate change and divisiveness, it's easy to wonder what newcomers to Planet Earth might make of us and our struggles. Whatever the case, well over a majority of Americans echo the sentiment of the slogan from "The X-Files": "The truth is out there."

A 2021 surveyconducted by the Pew Research Center showed about two-thirds of Americans said their best guess is that intelligent life exists on other planets. About half of U.S. adults said UFOs reported by people in the military are "definitely" or "probably" evidence of intelligent life outside Earth.

"We don't want to think this is the only place in this extraordinarily and incomprehensibly large universe where life and intelligence and even technology have emerged," says Bill Diamond, president and chief executive of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

"It sort of says about humans, 'We don't want to be alone.'"

Something is up there. But what?

Americans have been fascinated by the thought of life outside this planet following the recovery of debris in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico. The military initially said the material was from a flying disc, only to reverse course and tell the public it was from a weather balloon.

Hollywood ran with it. Flying saucers, little green men and eventually humanoid gray aliens became part of popular culture. April 5 even is celebrated annually throughout the iconic "Star Trek" franchise as "First Contact Day" to mark the date in 2063 when humankind, in "Trek" canon, first made contact with Vulcans.

Much in the popular culture suggests any aliens might be aggressive. Priscilla Wald, who teaches about science fiction at Duke University, has a theory as to why.

"It seems to me it's a reflection on who we are, that we're projecting onto aliens the way we treat each other," Wald says. "So the aliens are coming down, they want to conquer us, they're violent. Who does that sound like? It sounds like us."

In 2024,the Pentagon released hundreds of reportsof unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena. However, thatreviewgave no indications that their origins were extraterrestrial.

On two separate occasions, Debbie Dmytro saw things in the sky over Michigan's southern Oakland County. The greenish object Dmytro says she saw March 1 in the sky over Royal Oak, Michigan, looked like neither plane nor helicopter. Dmytro, a 56-year-old medical professional, acknowledges that it could have been some type of commercial or delivery drone.

What she saw in 2023 in the same general area north of Detroit is not so easily explained.

"Four yellow lights, yellowish golden lights and they were all flying very, very low," Dmytro remembers. She says the lights were about 100 feet (30 meters) up at their nearest.

"I've never seen anything so low without any noise and flying in complete uniformity," she says. "Is it something man-made? Is it something that's not manmade? Who knows?"

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Who knows indeed? UFOs, the term for unidentified flying objects, has in recent years given way to UAP — unidentified aerial phenomena or unidentified anomalous phenomena.

"Absolutely, there are such things" as UAPs and UFOs, says Diamond, whose SETI — Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — seeks to explore, search and understand the nature of life and intelligence in the universe.

"People observe things in the sky that they can't immediately identify or recognize as either human engineering such as planes or drones or helicopters, or animals, such as birds, and therefore they don't know what they are," Diamond says.

Time for the truth

Like so many, Dmytro wants to know what the government knows. "I think there's more information out there. I'm open to learning more," she says. "I have an open mind. It's always about scientific proof."

Retired Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet says evidence clearly shows there are UAP zipping around the airspace and in the oceans.

"The nonhuman intelligence that operates them or controls them are absolutely real," Gallaudet says. "We've recovered crashed craft. We don't know if they're extraterrestrial in origin."

Gallaudet worked as acting administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He participated in a 2024 congressional hearing on UAP disclosure and says the release of government files promised by Trump is something people find of interest. He just hopes the president follows through.

There are billions of galaxies in the universe and each has billions of stars, so the likelihood life developed elsewhere is fairly high, according to University of Michigan Astronomy Professor Edwin Bergin, who teaches about looking for life elsewhere. He believes that if intelligent beings navigated vast distances to reach Earth they would make themselves known — despite humanity's penchant for creating chaos.

"I would think that they would look at us like we were crazy ... but they would come out," he says. "I mean, why come here otherwise unless you're going to sit and observe."

Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory & Computation at Harvard and head of the university's Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts, believes in the likely existence of extraterrestrials.

"They might be laughing at us," he says. "They might be watching us ... to make sure we will not become predators, that we will not become dangerous to them."

In the interest of national security

Much of the government's secrecy around UFOs and UAP is tied to national security concerns, according to Diamond.

"We have pretty advanced technologies, satellite, ground-based that are for various purposes mostly national security and defense that are pointing at the sky or things on board aircraft," Diamond says. "Sometimes these pick up objects. The technology behind it is sensitive and protected."

Government data, including a "trove " of UAP video the Navy is sitting on, should be shared with scientists for research and a better understanding of the characteristics of the objects, says Gallaudet, who spent 32 years in the Navy and viewed classified UAP video.

"When you look at these things in our airspace having near collisions with our aircraft, that's a real valid concern," he says. "We are just not sure of what they are and what they intend to do with their interaction with humanity. That could be a national security threat, or not."

"When has ignorance ever been a good national strategy?" Gallaudet asks. "Whether it be scary, harmful or not, or a mix, I think seeking the truth is in our best interest."

Meanwhile, Diamond doesn't think any "true alien encounter could be kept secret."

"If any civilization has mastered interstellar travel, they have technology and capabilities beyond our wildest comprehension," he says. "If they want to interact, they will; if they don't, they won't. If they want to be seen, they will be, and if not, they won't be!"

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April 03, 2026

As Trump orders UFO data released, a question hangs: If aliens exist, what would they think of us?

For generations, human beings have wondered: What would alien life from another planet be like? But we rarely ask the opp...

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Women take pride in Holy Week roles after a Spanish Catholic brotherhood's procession excluded them

MONTORO, Spain (AP) — One religious brotherhood's refusal to include women in itsHoly Weekprocession has made front-page news in Spain, whose Easter-time festivities dating back centuries are among the most fervently celebrated in the world.

Spain-Holy Week-Women

The exclusion is the exception in the Catholic processions that have been unfolding across the country. They vary from hourslong versions that attract tens of thousands of faithful and tourists in major cities likeSevilleto village affairs that speak more intimately to family and tradition.

There was indignation at the controversy unfolding in Sagunto, where a majority of the Puríssima Sang de Nostre Senyor Jesucrist brotherhood's members voted to exclude women and said their decision was based on "respect for tradition." The news triggered protests from the government as well as in the streets.

Holy Week processions in Spain are elaborate affairs that take months to prepare, peaking in the early hours ofGood Friday, one of the most solemn days.

Brotherhoods organize the groups that for hours carry the heavy floats with statues, sometimes up to half a dozen of them representing scenes from the Gospels' accounts of Jesus' passion and death, like Judas' betraying kiss onthe Mount of Olives.

Women are sometimes "portadoras," carrying the floats on their shoulders.

In Baena, a hilltop hamlet of whitewashed homes among Andalusia's olive groves, eyelashes lushly covered in mascara were seen through the purple hoods of women carrying a flower-decked float with a statue of Jesus in prayer.

In Montoro, another village in the same province of Córdoba, a member of a local brotherhood said men and women should have equal roles, especially since the sacred images carried in procession include both the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

"In my house I have three daughters, with my wife that's four, and with me we're five — and the whole family takes part," added Ricardo Ruano, who on Holy Thursday was a "costalero," one of the robed people carrying large floats on the base of their neck. "We wait for this the whole year, because it's our favorite."

Several "portadoras" in Montoro said they were indignant at the controversy in Sagunto.

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"We as women have the same right as a man to go out in the procession," said one, Rosa de la Cruz. "We don't go in a procession so that people look at us, we participate so that they see the image."

Many in the village devoted their Holy Week prayers to the victims of adevastating train accidentoutside a nearby town that killed nearly four dozen people in January.

Even as Spain, like most of Europe, isincreasingly secular, interest keeps growing in participating in procession roles, said Juan Carlos González Faraco, a University of Huelva professor. He has studied religious traditions in Andalusia, including theEl Rocío pilgrimageat the end of the Easter season.

Historically male, brotherhoods have been including women in both leadership and processional roles for decades, he added. That's especially true in the lines of often hooded "penitents" who march alongside the floats, though some of the heaviest floats are still carried only by men.

In Montoro, Mari Carmen Lopez said physical strength might vary, but men and women share the same feeling.

"We go with faith, with devotion, with all our hearts," she said as her brotherhood's float made its way through the village's uphill alleys. Men who disregard that, she added, "don't realize they were born of a woman."

Dell'Orto reported from Miami.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP'scollaborationwith The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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April 03, 2026

Women take pride in Holy Week roles after a Spanish Catholic brotherhood's procession excluded them

MONTORO, Spain (AP) — One religious brotherhood's refusal to include women in itsHoly Weekprocession has made front-p...

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