This Is The Moment To Celebrate NCAA Women’s Basketball

And now for the most important reason to bring back College Hoops: 2K needs to capitalize on and join in the current wave of support for NCAA women’s basketball. The women’s tournament has been thriving with dynamic players and teams facing off for the past few years, while the men’s game has floundered, with programs struggling to adapt to the NIL era in college sports.

2K has been integrating the WNBA more into NBA 2K, but the publisher has the opportunity to not only revitalize the College Hoops franchise by making it more inclusive but also to center female basketball players the way no video game ever has. Imagine USC’s JuJu Watkins as the sole cover athlete of College Hoops 2K26. That would go insanely hard.

“Go woke go broke” is ridiculous in any context, but as far as the audience for basketball video games is concerned, which is naturally as progressive as the audience for basketball IRL, this is a rare moment in which the monetary and cultural motivations for diversifying a game would perfectly overlap. 2K can prove it’s a supporter of female athletes by starting the next generation of College Hoops with the most inclusive rendering of college basketball ever seen in a video game, welcoming players who’ve never been fully represented in gaming culture.

Have NCAA men’s and women’s basketball in the new College Hoops on day one, plus Legacy and created player modes for both, and true ball-knowers will swarm to the game like Angel Reese on a “mebound.”