FanHouse Brittney Griner

Change doesn't always come quickly.

For example, when everyone says that Baylor freshman Brittney Griner will change women's basketball. Well, sure, she will.

But did we all expect it to happen in the first couple of weeks?

In the first three games of her college career, she has tried to dunk twice and missed both. Sunday at No. 17 Cal in Berkeley, Calif., Griner had an opportunity in the closing moments of a 69-49 victory. Baylor had the ball in transition and guard Melissa Jones passed the ball to Griner behind her back at the baseline. Griner went up with her right hand to dunk and the ball bounced off the rim. She pulled down the rebound and was fouled.

What have we learned after one weekend of the college season?

Brittney Griner is a freshman. OK ... that's a little obvious. But we might forget that as we are distracted by the dunking. When Griner picked up four fouls early in the second half against Tennessee, it was a needed jolt of reality. Freshmen, well, they have a tendency to foul at inconvenient times and with maddening frequency. Keeping Griner on the floor may be a bigger challenge for Baylor than breaking in a load of young players.

Jayne Appel isn't 100 percent. Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said as much about her senior center, who is coming off offseason knee surgery for the second year in a row, after the team's win over Rutgers, the end of a very good starting weekend for the No. 2 Cardinal. Appel finished with 11 points against the Scarlet Knights on 3 of 10 shooting, and 12 rebounds. But VanDerveer sounds concerned.

"She has no ups," VanDerveer said. "She doesn't have spring."

Dunks in women's basketball have been like meteors in the night sky, fleeting moments of excitement, flashes that fade quickly until the next one shows up. Six women have dunked in a college game, totaling 15 dunks.

When a dunk happens, it makes the highlight reel, sparks a brief discussion about the impact on the women's game and then fades away again.

But along comes Baylor's Brittney Griner, who promises a meteor shower. It's no overstatement to say that Griner will change the women's game beginning Sunday when the seventh-ranked Bears take on No. 8 Tennessee in Knoxville in the State Farm Tip-off Classic.

Sometimes you can watch so much basketball you forget how hard it really is to dunk. Guys like LeBron James and Dwight Howard make highlight reels for dunking on a daily basis, and any college basketball player worth his weight in Nikes can throw it down when given the chance.

That is where Brittney Griner comes in. See, we've never had a female basketball player that made dunking look easy. Lisa Leslie and Candace Parker have both flushed it before, but it looked more like they were trying to avoid ripping their arm out of socket than to dunk. Griner is 6-foot-8 and can dunk on the run, in traffic and even, as the video after the jump will show, in a girl's grill.

Griner is heading to Baylor next season with the expectations of the world on her shoulders. That will probably be the first time you see Griner, though, because though she's a McDonald All-American this season, her high school won't let her miss class. To go to an All-American game. Yes, shaking your head at this point is acceptable.

This is Brittney Griner, a high school girl who can dunk a basketball. Easily:

That video actually shows Griner when she was a 6-foot-5 sophomore. She's now a 6-foot-7 junior, and she doesn't just dunk in practice, she also dunks in games, and not just those "dunks" where the player's fingers are about an inch above the rim. I'm talking about dunks where her elbows are hitting the rim.

Griner, who has 29 double-doubles in 29 games this year, has committed to Baylor, and the Bears' recruiting class of 2009 is being called one of the best in women's basketball history. I have a feeling we're going to see her dunk a lot in the coming years.