While most of America's televisions never budged from the steady stream of Thanksgiving football, the eyes of an entire movement were set on one of the most important games in the Title IX wars: a Mountain West women’s volleyball tournament held Saturday. The match pitted trans-identifying Blaire Fleming and the San Jose State girls’ team against an all-female squad, the Colorado State Rams — a showdown that moved forward at the last minute thanks to a leftist Biden-appointed judge. And, like the season leading up to it, the final was full of one thing: drama.

Of course, the game between San Jose and Colorado State would have never happened if a string of schools hadn’t forfeited their matches in protest of Fleming. Five teams — including Boise State, who Colorado would have faced in the semi-final — withdrew from the competition over safety and fairness concerns. Twelve players and coaches even sued the NCAA for its refusal to intervene, three from Fleming’s own team. And still, San Jose stuck stubbornly to its guns.

In the end, despite his dominant play, Fleming and his Spartans fell in four sets to Colorado State — securing the Rams’ spot in the NCAA Division I tournament and closing the chapter on a disconcerting season in the Mountain West Conference. “It’s hard to know who might be happier about that victory,” Dan Zaksheske pointed out, “Colorado State or the NCAA.” “Not only does the NCAA avoid controversy,” he explained, “but the Mountain West’s headache ends with the San Jose State loss, as well. Fleming is in the final year of college eligibility, so Fleming’s indoor collegiate volleyball career is over.”

But the NCAA isn’t out of the woods yet — far from it. The lawsuit goes on, as does the mountain of legal challenges over Joe Biden’s Title IX rewrite that would make these outrages permanent.

As Concerned Women for America Senior Advisor Doreen Denny told The Washington Stand, the fallout from this madness belongs in the lap of the NCAA’s current leadership. “While Mountain West volleyball was embroiled in another NCAA trans athlete scandal all season, NCAA President Charlie Baker has played dodgeball. He barely dodged the controversy advancing to the national championship stage with San Jose State’s loss to Colorado State.”

Whatever Baker thinks, she warned, “Ignoring the trans scandal in women’s college sports won’t make it go away — the national indictment of the NCAA is far from over. Two female athlete lawsuits entangling NCAA entities over disgraceful trans participation policies are alive and well in federal court. The cover of the Biden administration’s Title IX gender ideology mandate that flagrantly discriminates against women is about to be ripped off in a second Trump term.”

For now, both coaches at the heart of this latest firestorm agreed that it had been “far from a regular season.” Behind the scenes, Colorado State Coach Emily Kohan admitted that it had been “a really complex and emotional situation for us. … Unless you’re in those rooms having those hard conversations and making those hard decisions, I don’t think you truly know how this feels. I also think that regardless of your opinion on it, there’s some room here to acknowledge that there’s been a lot of young people showing courage all season long in a lot of ways.” Still, she insisted, what happened on the court Saturday “made a statement.”

San Jose’s bench boss had a decidedly different reaction, blaming the colleges that forfeited for the “appalling, hateful messages” the school received. Equally upsetting, Todd Kress acknowledged in a lengthy statement, is that long-time players decided not to return this season — all because of Fleming’s participation. “To be clear,” he said, “we did not celebrate a single win by forfeiture. Instead, we braced for the fallout.” Like the other teams in the conference, he struggled with the dominos that fell after the previous coach recruited Fleming. “I will not sugarcoat our reality for the last two months. Our team prepared and was ready to play each match according to established Mountain West and NCAA rules of play. We did not take away anyone’s participation opportunities.” 

His co-captain, Brooke Slusser disagrees, taking the brave step of joining a massive lawsuit against the NCAA because of her school’s refusal to protect the women’s team. Asked what kind of reaction she’s gotten, Slusser replied, “There is so much love and support. And again, I have so many best friends on my volleyball team. It’s just that there’s so much pressure put on us to not talk about it and not voice your opinion that so many are just still so terrified to talk behind the scenes. I do have a lot of love and support from my team, so that’s all that I could ask for. And I’m not asking them to stand up and talk, because that’s what I’ve decided to do,” she told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “And I’m doing this for me and for them.”

The story caught fire before the election, making nationwide headlines at a time when then-candidate Donald Trump was vowing to roll back this lunacy. But despite the backlash, school officials dug in their heels, even going so far as to suspend a coach for speaking out. That’s the part Michele Tafoya, a former NFL sideline reporter, can’t believe. How could San Jose State and the NCAA abandon these girls, leaving them to fight for their own protection, privacy, and opportunity?

“This is what is so shocking about this whole thing,” she lamented. “And I think this is why this played a role in the election. …[F]irst of all, bravo to Brooke. Hang in there, kid. We got your back. But this is insane. And what it’s done is, it’s not just taken spots away from women on teams or awards from women on teams. It has asked normal people to deny the truth in life that men and women are different. It is forcing people to shut up and not say what is true.” And what is true, she emphasized, is that “men and women are biologically different, and you don’t see women going over and playing in men’s sports. Women who identify as men, they don’t go into that avenue because they wouldn’t survive it. But men are coming over to the women’s side. … And that is a scary place to be in America.”

The vast majority of Americans are banking on Trump to change that. And yet, as Denny pointed out to TWS, “Even if the NCAA’s ivory tower of trans ideology is about to crumble, you’d never know it by the actions of the NCAA governing bureaucracy and its rubber-stamping college administrators, including Baylor President Linda Livingstone who is back for another term as chair of the NCAA Board of Governors.” Believe it or not, she warned, “Next month, the NCAA plans to double down on its ideological DEI agenda by having all Divisions vote on a new Committee on Diversity Equity Inclusion and Belonging during its annual convention in Nashville.”

“If college administrators have any spine,” Denny said, “they will see this convention as a chance to reject the NCAA’s shameless promotion of a failed progressive political agenda and demand that it be thoroughly weeded out.”