Kenny Brooks went on The Paul Finebaum Show and made an argument you do not hear often from inside the sport: women's basketball, he said, is still in its purest form, even with the rising athleticism of the players coming through it. That is the whole of it, and I do not have the full transcript in front of me, just the shape of the case. But the shape is the interesting part.
Here is why it lands coming from him. Brooks is not a guy talking about the game from a studio chair. He built James Madison into a machine, took over at Virginia Tech, and got that program to the first Final Four in its history in 2023, which is not a thing you do by accident. Then he took the Kentucky job. He has coached the sport through the exact stretch he is describing: the athleticism curve bending up, the shooting range stretching out, the crowds arriving in numbers nobody in that gym would have predicted a decade ago.
The "purest form" line is going to get misread, and it usually does. People hear it as a backhanded compliment, a nice way of saying slower. That is not what a coach means. A coach means the possessions still have shape. Screens get set. Cuts get made because the cut is open, not because the play sheet says so. The ball moves through more than two hands. You can watch a full offensive set and understand what everybody on the floor was trying to do, which is a real and underrated pleasure.
The honest pushback: "pure" is a word that can quietly mean "before you got here," and this generation is the most skilled one the sport has produced. Brooks seems to be arguing they added to it rather than replaced it. That is the more generous read and probably the right one.
What comes next for him is the part I am actually watching. Kentucky is a job with resources and expectations, in a league that has turned into a bloodbath top to bottom. Talking about the purity of the game is easy. Winning in the SEC while the rest of the sport is getting bigger, faster and richer is the real test of the theory.