Neutrality Isn't Always The Way to Go

Maryland's Marissa Coleman had 42 points and 15 rebounds on Saturday against Vanderbilt, but who was watching?

By Mike Wise


Fewer than 3,000 people paid to witness one of the signature performances in the annals of college basketball Saturday afternoon here -- in an arena that holds about 19,000.

ESPN did its best to camouflage the nearly 16,000 empty seats inside RBC Center, including the completely vacant sections behind both baskets that reached to the rafters. But the fact that only a smattering of four fan bases saw Marissa Coleman rally Maryland to within one victory of the NCAA women's Final Four is a damning indictment on the people who claim to love and promote the sport.

How Coleman's virtuoso 42-point performance to stave off Vanderbilt, laced with equal parts grit and skill, was seen by a national cable audience and not at least 10,000 in person has nothing to do with, sadly, the game's time-honored adversaries -- sexism and male chauvinism.

No, the perpetrator this time was the old heads at the NCAA, who really need to take a hard look at what communities care about women's basketball (programs such as Connecticut, Tennessee, Iowa State, Oklahoma and, recently, Maryland) and who doesn't (Raleigh and any other city that doesn't have a team in the tournament).

They need to stop the illusion of this ridiculous pod system that's supposed to encourage parity, whereby Stanford can play in nearby Berkeley and U-Conn. doesn't have to travel any farther than Trenton, N.J., during the tournament to earn a trip to the Final Four while a top-seeded Duke team has to play ninth-seeded Michigan State in East Lansing, where it got beat, and a top-seeded Maryland team showcases two of the nation's most polished and poised players, Coleman and Kristi Toliver, before two sections of its own fans.

Give up the illusion of competitive balance. Until the Final Four, award home court to the tournament's top seeds the first two rounds and give them the regionals to boot. Give back to the programs who carry the sport, rotating the Final Four to the towns and teams that have demonstrated they will buy tickets to see a spectacle that doesn't just involve their own players.

This means places such as Knoxville, Tenn., and Storrs, Conn., still the top two programs in attendance, which combined to draw almost 400,000 this past season, and also sites such as Lubbock, Tex., and College Park, which drew nearly 8,700 people per game last year.

Stop trying to convert a huge section of people who don't care now and never will.

In 1984, Cheryl Miller, the first great player of the game's modern era, led Southern Cal to its second straight national championship on a team that included the McGee twins, Pam and Paula, and a young Cynthia Cooper. Miller and that team boosted attendance to unprecedented levels. When you start from nothing, of course, those levels don't exactly make you drop your jaw.

The paid attendance at the NCAA championship game in Los Angeles that year against Pat Summitt's Tennessee program was 5,365.

Twenty-five years ago, the NCAA was thrilled to have 5,000 people for a championship. So in that context, 3,000 for a regional semifinal might not sound so bad, especially when you consider that it's only in the last few years that women's championships are decided by players making shots, instead of missing them. And that women's basketball has been an Olympic sport only since 1976.