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I interrupted my reading of the comments on the basketball gender gap to turn on the Aggie Women's first round game in the NCAA tourney. The question of why women's roundball is so much less popular than the men's version vexes many fans and Megan's post is indirectly stimuated by Christine Brennan's USA today column proposing playing the men's and women's tourneys at the same sites. Radley Balko points out that this is unlikely to help the women. This year's Big 12 tournament had both men's and women's games in Kansas City, and this probably helped fans go to both games. But in the NCAAs, not nearly as many schools will have both teams in their respective tourneys, much less seeded in a way that would not distort the system dramatically if they were put in the same sites. The arguments that the men's game is more popular due to differences in skill level or lack of dunking are off the mark, IMO. Fans of college sports don't seem to mind the fact that they aren't watching the best possible practitioners of the art. It isn't because men identify more with other men - men are perfectly happy to watch horses and cars race each other and no one says, well I can identify with being a horse. And it isn't that the inherent differences in strength and size are the key: various commentators have pointed out the popularity of women's tennis vs. men's. I suspect that the popularity gap isn't about gender at all. It's about history. Brennan writes: But for an event in its 27th year, it still has the look and feel of a second-class citizen, a major NCAA championship played in the huge shadow cast by another major NCAA championship. At USATODAY.com, the men's bracket received 50,541 page views on Monday. The women's had 6,428 on Tuesday. That's almost an 8-1 ratio.27 years isn't that long in context. Consider some of the most successful programs. Tennessee didn't play women's bball from 1926-1968. UConn, Stanford, Rutgers, and N. Carolina started in 1974, after Title IX. The relatively short history means that the fraction of women who even played basketball has been rising dramatically, This has been raising the overall talent levels in the women's game. The larger number of players translates into more good ones, which means more competitive and entertaining games. We're finally getting to the point where the one dominant player does not guarantee a dominant team. This year's field has a bunch of them, and one of the strong candidates for national player of the year, OU's Courtney Paris, is on a 4 seed that didn't even finish in the top 4 of their conference. Women's basketball is clearly coming into its own now that it has its own recruiting scandals and grandstanding politicians. Meanwhile, the Aggies win big.
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