http://www.toledoblade.com/College/2017/...mmets.html

How about making UConn play on the road some time....

Or just use small arenas. And cope

The fact that no other local teams other than UConn were in their region makes total sense for the attendance. Imagine what the numbers would have been without UConn selling out its regional site.

The WNBA can't sell seats. Attendance for women at a high level is just at a few schools. I'm sure they're trying to make a national product, but may have to have the games on campus at select schools until the finals.

I didn't look at all the brackets but w/r to Toledo, if they had tweaked the seedings just a touch they should have been able to keep teams that draw fairly well closer to home. I would have loved to see a 12 seed Lady Rocket team play in Columbus. There would have been a lot more Rockets in Columbus than there were in Eugene and most fans stay for the double header which helps both games.

(03-30-2017 10:08 PM)T-Town Wrote:  I didn't look at all the brackets but w/r to Toledo, if they had tweaked the seedings just a touch they should have been able to keep teams that draw fairly well closer to home. I would have loved to see a 12 seed Lady Rocket team play in Columbus. There would have been a lot more Rockets in Columbus than there were in Eugene and most fans stay for the double header which helps both games.

They try to do that. The big issue with Ohio State was the Schottenstein Center wasn't available. If OSU was a Top 4 seed, I'm sure they could have worked something out with St. John Arena. Instead, they had Kentucky host as a 4 seed with OSU as the 5 and two other nearby schools (Belmont and WKU) as the other seeds. Same with Louisville hosting and three regional schools going there (Tennessee, Tennessee-Chattanooga, and Dayton).

But some Top 4 seed sites are just hard to get four local teams to get to or seeds don't line up. I'm sure the NCAA would have loved to see Quinnipiac get blown out by Syracuse in Storrs instead of Iowa State, but those two teams were so far apart in seeding that they just couldn't make it work. Plus, Iowa State couldn't play at Kansas State in the first round, so Drake got to stay close to home. Other than Iowa State, it was an easy trip to UConn for Albany and Syracuse. The NCAA can usually get four teams from four conferences on the East Coast to UConn. It worked out great in 2015 when UConn played St. Francis-Brooklyn and Rutgers played Seton Hall. All three of those NYC Metro schools were within a three-hour bus ride to Storrs.

The NCAA does really try to get as many teams close to home as possible in the women's tournament (unlike the men, where only the Top 4 seeds are given "pod" consideration). My best friend used to work in women's college basketball and every year he would come very close to putting together an accurate bracket with host schools and seeds of local schools. They just have limitations and unfortunately for teams like Toledo, Creighton, Marquette, and DePaul, they were bumped from the Notre Dame, Kentucky, and Louisville sites and had to be used to fill gaps elsewhere.

As for the regional setup, if you're going to have Stockton as a regional site and Stanford is a 2 seed, put them in the Stockton region! It's not brain surgery. Stanford is literally down the road and has a much better following than Oregon State. As for the other sites, it hurt that Kentucky lost in the second round and Louisville wasn't good enough to get a 2 or 3 seed so they could get placed in the Lexington region. But the attendance would have been so much different at Stockton if Stanford was put there instead of Oregon State, especially since they weren't able to host the first two rounds.

Speaking of UConn...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaabk/u...spartandhp

(04-01-2017 06:25 AM)SylvaniaRocket Wrote:  Speaking of UConn...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaabk/u...spartandhp

Wow! I thought that this UConn team was "UCLA/Wooden" good meaning that they could have a bad night against a really good team and still win. Of course even Wooden lost once in a while during those UCLA miracle years. Off the top of my head I remember upsets of UCLA by Notre Dame, Houston and N.C. State

UConn lost so much from last season and I'm amazed that they made it all the way to the Final Four undefeated. I think they are better than Mississippi State, but you can't have an off night and still win against a team that has won 30 games. They had some off nights earlier in the season, but the AAC is an incredibly weak conference for women's basketball.

(04-03-2017 07:28 AM)Rocket Pirate Wrote:  UConn lost so much from last season and I'm amazed that they made it all the way to the Final Four undefeated. I think they are better than Mississippi State, but you can't have an off night and still win against a team that has won 30 games. They had some off nights earlier in the season, but the AAC is an incredibly weak conference for women's basketball.

Compared to the SEC and PAC12?? Sure. Tenple and USF were top 25 teams all season though. Only a handful of leagues are even multibid leagues. It is ranked the 5th best by RPI.