I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. This is a Saturday special.

Some of you listening right now may be looking forward to watching a lot of college basketball

in the next few days as the March Madness Tournament for both the men and women will be entering into the Sweet 16 round tomorrow.

But off the court, you may have heard about a different kind of madness, the disparity in resources that the NCAA, the organization in charge of college sports and including the March Madness tournament,

has provided for the competing male and female basketball teams this year.

With me now to catch us up on what was revealed in the last week,

as well as talk about her own experiences covering women in sports over her career,

is Sally Jenkins, sports columnist for The Washington Post, and formerly

a senior writer for Sports Illustrated.

Hi, Sally, thanks for your time.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Glad to be here.

So last week, for people who haven't heard this story, videos posted by female players

competing in this year's March Madness, brought to light some of the differences

between the male and female bubbles, COVID bubbles, where the athletes are competing,

the men in Indianapolis and the women in San Antonio.

So, Sally, help listeners who aren't as familiar with the story understand it.

What was revealed last week?

Well, what was revealed was a pretty pervasive, you know, disparity in terms of the basic promotion of the women's event. Literally,

the floors that the women are playing on look inferior and are inferior. The testing for COVID is different. The men are getting

a more expensive and more reliable PCR testing, whereas the women have been getting antigen

testing and also the circumstances under which they're tested are different. I talked to a woman's

...