Sharon Crowson says the W season was great till the finals began. She also says we really do have more parity-- nobody's as good as Detroit, but there's a big old pileup right below where the Shock stand, in part because (Sharon says) there's a deeper pool of players, but also because (she says) we have better coaches, coaches attuned to the pro, not to the college, game.

It's true that no coaches now come from the most prestigious NCAA posts to the W... but is that because the W has a better, deeper source of coaching talent? Or is it because nobody today would make the same career move as Carolyn Peck? When the W started nobody knew what would happen: some people thought it would get very big, very soon-- so big as to make it financially worthwhile to leave a BCS conference head coaching job, as Peck did and as Van Chancellor did too.

Does anyone think that now? When college head coaches leave college jobs for the W, they're coming from places like UMKC (which didn't work out so well).

The question is whether the new pool of talent-- former WNBA assistants, former WNBA players, and, in the wake of Bill Laimbeer's first championship year, former NBA types-- is better or worse than the old. Sharon says it's better. That's probably true-- though the ex-NBA types (Laimbeer, Whitehead, Thibault) have had the best of it so far, and the WNBA-management veterans (Linda Hargrove, anyone?) some of the worst.