Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported on the findings of an independent review of the way the NCAA deals with men’s basketball as compared to women’s basketball. The report recommends “a combined Final Four tournament for men and women”. You should read the Post article here.
Let me be clear; there is no way to pretend that the NCAA values women’s basketball to the same degree that it values men’s basketball and the ambience enveloping the two tournaments is very different. Anyone who would try to argue that there is equality or even equivalency in the NCAA’s support and promotion of the two tournaments would be judged to have the mental acumen of a Kleenex. There is a natural tendency to seek to bring the two events more in line with each other.
Having said that, I doubt that having a co-ed Final Four is going to help all that much. The way the NCAA handles the men’s tournament calls for a football stadium venue that seats 60,000 or more fans. [Aside: I do not like games in such facilities; I greatly prefer to see basketball played in more compact arenas. Nonetheless, that is how the NCAA stages the men’s Final Four.] The tickets for the men’s Final Four are hard to come by; there is a scalper’s market for those tickets.
The women’s tournament – less highly publicized and promoted to be sure – often does not fill a basketball arena and I seriously doubt that the women’s Final Four could possibly fill a football stadium even if the NCAA handed out tickets with $20-bills stapled to them. So, think for a moment about the logistics of a co-ed Final Four.
- Option 1: Play the women’s games on Friday/Sunday and the men’s games on Saturday/Monday. Put all the games on TV in prime time. That is logistically simple; all it requires is for the NCAA to pick a city with a domed football stadium and book the venue for a slightly longer period than it does now. Here is a problem though… If anyone wanted to demonstrate the difference in the popularity of men’s college basketball and women’s college basketball, these four nights of television would be Exhibit One. Friday and Sunday would see the crowd rattling around in the stadium like the proverbial bee-bee in a box car; Saturday and Monday would see a packed house.
- Option 2: Play one men’s semi-final game and one women’s semi-final game on Friday and the other semi-final games on Saturday as TV double-headers. Leave Sunday dark on TV and play both the women’s and men’s final games on Monday night. While there will still be obvious disparities in crowd size and in TV ratings, this option would offer the chance to expose the women’s game to an audience that is receptive to seeing basketball games either in person or on TV.
Putting together a co-ed Final Four would not hurt anything; the venues for the next few tournaments are already set contractually so there might be some difficulty in making this happen immediately, but this is an idea that can be made to happen. I think, however, that a co-ed Final Four will not address what I believe is the fundamental reason why men’s college basketball is the more popular sport:
- There are only a few very good women’s teams and they do not play one another very often until tournament time meaning that there are too many regular season women’s games that are either blow-outs or games involving “teams that just don’t matter”.
It simply is not entertaining to watch a basketball game where the final score is 90 – 49 and there are far too many such games on women’s college basketball schedules. Yes, there are non-competitive men’s games too that are nothing but glorified scrimmages for the better team, but there are not as many. Attendance at a game or tuning in to watch one on TV is generally an act that seeks entertainment; there are too many women’s college basketball games that are not even interesting let alone entertaining to get my primary attention when seeking a period of sports entertainment.
The resolution of the issues in the paragraph above is the key element needed to raise the level of interest in women’s college basketball to a point where a co-ed Final Four would not starkly display the disparate levels of interest in the two sports. While I am not in the habit of defending the NCAA on any issue, I do not see how the NCAA is going to be able to increase the entertainment value of so many women’s games that lead up to any sort of co-ed Final Four.
The current trend in college football – – the BIG revenue generator for collegiate athletic departments – – is that the rich are getting richer. If that momentum carries over to women’s college basketball, I doubt that any sort of “urgent action” on the part of the NCAA will be effective. Getting the generic sports fan out there in Peoria to pay the same amount of attention to women’s college basketball as he/she does to men’s college basketball more likely requires the use of a magic wand and not just a more focused marketing effort and a co-ed Final Four.
Finally, since today’s rant has considered the creation of a co-ed Final Four, let me close with this comment about co-eds by satirist Dorothy Parker:
“If all these sweet young things were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………