{"id":664081,"date":"2026-03-18T02:56:25","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T02:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/664081\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T02:56:25","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T02:56:25","slug":"espn-publishes-erroneous-ncaa-wbb-tourney-preview-with-mens-team-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/664081\/","title":{"rendered":"ESPN publishes erroneous NCAA WBB tourney preview with men&#8217;s team records"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>ESPN will once again air the entirety of the NCAA women\u2019s basketball tournament across its family of networks starting this weekend.<\/p>\n<p>If you watch any of the network\u2019s daytime programming this week, you will see matchups, betting lines and news for the tournament draped across the screen.<\/p>\n<p>But early Tuesday, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/loganstephens24\/status\/2033917866651570300\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">women\u2019s hoops fans online noticed<\/a> that over on ESPN.com, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/espn\/betting\/story\/_\/id\/48219770\/espn-2026-tournament-women-bracket-game-odds\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">a betting preview for the tournament<\/a> 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\u2019 men\u2019s teams.<\/p>\n<p>Awful Announcing captured screenshots of several blurbs with this mistake:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cdn1.thecomeback.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/94\/2026\/03\/aaespnwbb1.png\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-862264 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aaespnwbb1-776x1024.png\" alt=\"Incorrect ESPN NCAA women's tournament betting preview \" width=\"776\" height=\"1024\"  \/><\/a>The original ESPN.com article<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/cdn1.thecomeback.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/94\/2026\/03\/aaespnwbb2.png\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-862265 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aaespnwbb2-950x1024.png\" alt=\"Incorrect ESPN NCAA women's tournament betting preview \" width=\"832\" height=\"897\"  \/><\/a>The original ESPN.com article<\/p>\n<p>These are straightforward mistakes. Dawn Staley\u2019s dynastic South Carolina squad would not be a No. 1 seed with a 13-19 record. The women\u2019s Gamecocks team played 16 SEC games, going 15-1, not 18 as displayed in the blurb.<\/p>\n<p>Western Illinois, of course, would not be a tournament team if they finished 5-26 this season, as their blurb indicates.<\/p>\n<p>The article has since been updated.<\/p>\n<p>The mix-up with the men\u2019s teams had all the makings of an AI mistake, as if a program could not properly differentiate between the men\u2019s and women\u2019s teams. There is no human byline on the betting preview article. The listed author is simply \u201cESPN.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>But considering that <a href=\"https:\/\/awfulannouncing.com\/espn\/reveals-broadcast-teams-ncaa-women-basketball-tournament.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">ESPN is the sole broadcast home of the NCAA women\u2019s tournament<\/a>, fans expect better for even this type of online content. Women\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ESPN will once again air the entirety of the NCAA women\u2019s basketball tournament across its family of networks&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[85271,7],"class_list":{"0":"post-664081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-2026-ncaa-womens-tournament","9":"tag-basketball"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116247933988363079","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}