So no one watches or cares about WCBB
- Thread starter GarnetGhost
- Start date
Cherry picked data. Now list all the men’s sporting events that had far more viewers. It’s a much longer list. Much, much longer.
No need to list any men's sporting events that had more viewers as my post is not intended as a competition among women's and men's events for viewership but rather a direct refutation to the notion tbat no one watches or cares about WCBB.
Both sides in this debate are not really looking at this clearly. Of course, Women’s CBB is not going to overtake Male sports in the sports landscape. However, men that are not noticing a shift have blinders on. March Madness still gets a big number on the Men’s side due to team allegiances, betting, and the outcomes of viewer brackets. However, Men’s CBB is nowhere close to what it used to be as no one really knows the players. if you are not rooting for a jersey on the male side why even watch. The Women’s side has recognizable names and personalities. DJ Burns is from the hometown, been knowing him since he was a kid, but who cared that he was even alive as a basketball player until the last three weeks.
Seems to me it's more about the product than anything else. We have been the best program for some time now. Our attendance is good. UConn's attendance is good. Iowa has what some say is the best player ever, their attendance is good. Now I dont know about the attendance of everyone else, but the common denominator seems to be these schools have put something worth watching on the court.
That said, I dont watch a whole lot of women's basketball so if anyone has stats on attendance on the also-ran teams that dont do as well, I'd be interested. I'd like to see women's sports across the board gain more interest but I'm guessing it must get better or the interest won't go beyond a select few teams.
That said, I dont watch a whole lot of women's basketball so if anyone has stats on attendance on the also-ran teams that dont do as well, I'd be interested. I'd like to see women's sports across the board gain more interest but I'm guessing it must get better or the interest won't go beyond a select few teams.
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It’s really simple…put a good product on the floor and people will watch. Put a team like the tater wbb team on the floor and 10s of 10s of people will watch. SC and a few others are mow at a different level.
I love watching our team these days.
That's kinda what I'm thinking. It's nice to be among the best but kinda figured there are far too many teams drawing 10s of 10s.
It really is that simple. Prior to Dawn, I doubt any of the posters here gave a flip about women's basketball. Now fans are passionate about it. But that passion for the sport would fizzle if we stopped being good.
It's also helped that there's been a massive and concerted marketing effort built around Caitlin Clark. She may not actually be the best women's player ever, but she came along at the right time with social media and the media's sudden desire to try making the women's game more popular, so she's benefitted immensely from that, as has the women's college game. She's an excellent player but has benefitted greatly from the biggest marketing effort in girls college basketball history. Unfortunately for her, she's off to the wasteland of the WNBA and not even she's good enough to make that popular.
There has been an intentional de-emphasis on marketing the men's game coupled with a massive marketing effort to boost the women's game.
As far as Burns, there are always lesser known players who become personalities during the NCAAT. It's part of the fun of the tournament. There were some electrifying players in MBB this year, like Dalton Knecht, but they simply weren't marketed for reasons we can't get into without getting the thread deleted.
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I'm not a passionate basketball fan. The things I stated above are obvious, right? The NCAA has publicly said they were going to market the women's game more strongly. This is no secret.
Women basketball player actually hang around for 4 years, so fans recognize them and develop a rooting interest in them, either for or against. Who knows any of these men's players? They come and go so quickly, and if they do play 4 years that means they are good enough to play professional (there are exceptions, of course). This trend will only continue.
Outside of SC, LSU, Iowa, UConn and maybe two or three other sports message boards, I would wager there aren't a total of 100 posts about WBB. Those fan groups live in a bubble that no other group cares at all about. If you went to a random bar outside of SC, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina and Connecticut and asked patrons to name the teams in the WBB Final Four I doubt 5% of the people would know two of them.
Your example betrays your age. Get on social media where young people are and you will see the growing impact of wbb. The trend will continue.
The Men's game gets marketed much more than it deserves IMO. There are hundreds of games that you can see on Saturdays. Games all through the week. Everything is Blockbuster this and Showcase that. However, CBB just does not have good players for the most part if you know basketball. The players that can be good are too young and they get plucked away before they can really play (Cough: GG Jackson). I have watched GG Jackson a good deal this year. This kid has the potential to be an All-Star player in the league and our fans never got the pleasure to see it. We are out here watching 24 year old, Sixth Year Seniors hanging on playing College Basketball because they have nowhere else to go. ....and some people try to act like it is the same and it is a quality product. Tennessee is an Elite 8 team and they have one guy on the team that can consistently score. NC State is in the Final Four. Purdue is has the College Player of the Year in Zach Edey. Edey tested the draft last year and was advised to go back to school. Even now, he could slide to the 2nd Round of the Draft. Imagine that, the College Player of the Year is a borderline Top 25-30 prospect in America. The players that have potential don't stick around to develop and become household names as college players. It's all this flash in the pan stuff from people you will probably never hear from again after "One Shining moment".
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To your first point, broadcasters are going to put whatever games on tv they believe will get the most eyeballs. They would broadcast zebras playing kickball if it guaranteed good ratings. Yes, there are a handful of women's games that draw a lot of eyeballs, but overall men's ratings crush women's ratings. That's why there's a glut of men's games on tv compared to women's.
......emphasis on good. No marketable stars whatsoever. You can't compare the college game of even a J.J. Redick to now. Don't get me started with the Duke vs. Fab Five Days. It's sad. However, people would watch a 5'0", blind guy play basketball if he had on the jersey of their favorite college team. Watch after the tournament ends. Every player that has any real potential will leave the college game and you will get another batch of freshmen to watch for 6 months. I bet you didn't watch 10 College Men's Basketball games that didn't have South Carolina in it. So, you probably don't know.
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That's why I laugh when people will rail about the NBA, but watch these college kids miss lay-ups and shoot 60% from the FT line. I still watch both the College and Professional basketball because I am just a hardcore basketball guy. However, if you want to watch young kids (like a GG) learn how to play, you have to watch the NBA now. If the Gamecocks had GG playing the way he is playing now, we might still be playing. The kid has had games playing alongside Steph Curry and he was the best player on the court. Just watched him go for like 36 points with 8 Three Pointers against the Warriors a couple weeks ago.
I'm not going to do it, but I bet if you boiled the numbers down you would find that the vast majority of people on social media posting anything about WBB are fans of the handful of teams I cited. Social media is not a real place and does not represent the views of the majority of people. The numbers of posts and views on social media platforms are overly influenced and weighted by a relatively small number of people. A reporter in 2022 did the research and found that around 80% of posts on twitter in the US were posted by around 2 million people. Major media reporters were basing their reporting and conclusions of what the public was thinking by looking at the trending topics on twitter. There are 350 million people in the US and reporters were reporting as "top stories" and "public sentiment" what a reasonable percentage of approximately 2 million of them were posting about.
Your reliance on social media betrays YOUR age. Social media is very much an echo chamber where people go for confirmation bias.
People, for the most part, watch college MBB for the same reason they watch college football. They feel some connection to the school. Some people, like you, love basketball and will watch whatever basketball is on. I would venture that the very vast majority of people do not watch much college basketball when teams they have no connection to or games that do not affect their team. I think NIL and the portal and the lack of continuity on rosters is going to push fans away from college MBB. A team having a really good, almost great season (i.e. USC this season) will not be able to count on any roster continuity for the next season. When every season is like a first time together for the team it will be harder for fans to hold on to the feeling of connection to the team.
lol that you claim to be all about your basketball knowledge but you're judging the men's game on "marketable stars". There are numerous outstanding men's players if you truly understand basketball. It's all marketing strategy and they made public their decision to prop up the women's game, hence the all-out media blitz on covering Caitlin Clark. Granted, there are no men's players right now who are on the level of, say, Zion Williamson from 2019, but those players are exceedingly rare anyway and we should not expect there to be a player like that every single season. Edey, as the presumptive top player in the game, has his marketing hurt because he doesn't produce highlight reel plays like Zion did with his dunks or like other players do by draining long 3s or whatever. It sounds as if you're the kind of person who likes who you're told to like.
Interesting, though, that you mention the Fab Five as they were all freshman and you're saying the game now sucks because it's dependent on freshmen.
Although, if we go with your position that there are no marketable men's players, what does it say that MBB ratings still crush WBB ratings even though WBB had it's most marketable player ever the last few years? It surely says something.
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You have to have them. I don't think you get what I mean by "Marketable". I am talking about their game. Not talking about their personalities. So, you are telling me a kid that played at the University of North Colorado and a Junior College is the best player in the college game and you are good with that. That's lets me know you don't know the history of the game and what the game was. So, the lineage of College Basketball is the former Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, Ralph Sampson, Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Christian Laettner, Shaq, Chris Webber, JJ Redick to Dalton Knecht. A kid nobody knew was alive as a basketball until 6 months ago. I guess that fine with you because you are doing what a lot of men do, including myself, because that is what you are used to doing. Watching March Madness this time of year. The difference between me and you is that I have the self-awareness to acknowledge that this is some *&****. Well you know what I want to say.
Nobody is arguing that the one-and-done rule isn't detrimental to the game. It's stupid and needs to go.
Curiously, the WNBA requires players be 22, have completed their college eligibility or be 4 years out of high school. NBA only requires a player be 19 years old during the calendar year of the draft. I'll give one guess as to why there's such a drastic difference.
I found out I am listed in that viewership. I have not watched 1 WBB game at home in over 4 years. Last one was a game we played UConn mid season and got smoked. I have watched us a couple since while at a bar and it was on, however, I am saying I didn't watch at home due to algorithms. I have YouTubeTV. When you select YouTubeTV on your smart tv, a show automatically is on based on your algorithm and what you watch normally. It either was set up to make people who don't normally watch WBB tune into in as soon as it came on (which I found even though I changed the channel less than 1 min later to what my son wanted to watch, I was included in the 12MM) to boost the numbers which really would not surprise me with how things are these days, OR there was literally nothing else on sports wise Sunday night and that's where my algorithm steered me. Regardless, I was included, even though I didn't watch it at all, just because my tv took me there before I selected what I wanted.
Either way, the number is inflated, because how many other people had this same issue?
The WNBA is barely marketable as a sport, and that's with players seasoned with 4 years of college eligibility. Think about seeing 19 year old girls out there playing basketball.
To the "no marketable players in MBB" argument. Lebron disagrees. In the very small handful of best NBA players of all time, and in the argument for best ever and one of the most marketed athletes of all time. "We watched the Purdue/Tennessee game because of Edey and Knect."
Tell that guy that Zach Edey will probably get drafted late 1st round. May even slide to the Second Round. He has been playing college ball for 4 years for a reason besides his education. With regard to Knecht. He is for real. Will probably be a Top 5 Pick. However, College Basketball should not be hanging its hat on a newly discovered guy that was playing Junior College Basketball 2 Years Ago. I look for skillset, not jerseys and tradition.
Beats me. If the NBA's all-time leading scorer thinks Edey and Knect were must-see TV, I think his opinion counts a bit more than yours.
I don't trust Lebron the GM. Love the player, but GM not so much. Lakers are still trying to build back up over that crazy trade for Russell Westbrook that he orchestrated.
So now you know more about basketball than Lebron. Kudos. What do you do for a living?
