ESPN will once again air the entirety of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament across its family of networks starting this weekend.
If you watch any of the network’s daytime programming this week, you will see matchups, betting lines and news for the tournament draped across the screen.
But early Tuesday, women’s hoops fans online noticed that over on ESPN.com, a betting preview for the tournament was handled with far less care. For several hours after the article was published, the win-loss records displayed in the blurbs breaking down each matchup appeared to have been mixed up with the record of the schools’ men’s teams.
Awful Announcing captured screenshots of several blurbs with this mistake:
These are straightforward mistakes. Dawn Staley’s dynastic South Carolina squad would not be a No. 1 seed with a 13-19 record. The women’s Gamecocks team played 16 SEC games, going 15-1, not 18 as displayed in the blurb.
Western Illinois, of course, would not be a tournament team if they finished 5-26 this season, as their blurb indicates.
The article has since been updated.
The mix-up with the men’s teams had all the makings of an AI mistake, as if a program could not properly differentiate between the men’s and women’s teams. There is no human byline on the betting preview article. The listed author is simply “ESPN.”
However, an ESPN spokesperson tells Awful Announcing that AI was not used to craft the betting preview article; this was a human mistake that was addressed after the publication of the article.
But considering that ESPN is the sole broadcast home of the NCAA women’s tournament, fans expect better for even this type of online content. Women’s sports fans are all too familiar with these sorts of easily avoided mistakes in the coverage of their favorite teams and leagues, especially coming in the shadow of men’s sports. Even taking into account how much content ESPN publishes, as the official broadcast partner of one of the biggest events on the calendar, the bar is high to be accurate 100 percent of the time.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.