SAN ANTONIO — The celebratory nature of the Final Four has been hard to ignore as hundreds of coaches have descended into town, many of them participating in Saturday’s 4Kay Run in honor of the late N.C. State coach to start the day.

At the Alamodome, several thousand fans gathered for the open practices, the announcement of the State Farm All-America team and Wade Trophy winner and to watch the WBCA High-School All-American Game.

It’s a great move by the NCAA to finally relent and let non-NCAA events at the Final Four venue, both for media access and for fans. The assembled UConn fans gave a rousing cheer to Maya Moore when she was announced as the Wade Trophy winner, although most were expecting her teammate, Tina Charles, to win that honor. (Charles later was named the AP player of the year.)

After all, this is the signature event in women’s collegiate athletics, which is something that it was not when I first attended in Knoxville 20 years ago. Nearly 25,000 fans turned out at Thompson-Boling Arena, and so many of the game’s promoters were certain that the women’s game was about ready to burst into the mainstream.

It would take a few more years until the Final Four became a sellout, and it that has been the case just about every year since. UConn hit the scene in mid-decade, bringing national media and ESPN along for what has been a 15-year ride.

As I have said many times to a sports media critic who’s fond of neither UConn nor ESPN, I don’t want to go back to the days before 1995. I get annoyed by the belief that there was something charming and quaint about the days when teams played for a national championship in front of 7,000 fans. That was the case in New Orleans in 1991, UConn’s first Final Four trip.

The sheer explosion of interest in women’s basketball, along with the funding and emphasis on building big-time programs since then, has been phenomenal. But at the same time, the questions of whether it’s grown too fast, and whether it’s grown for the right reasons (to mimic what’s on the men’s side) haven’t been fully addressed.

Even in the wake of a major recession, and with spending on women’s basketball programs at an all-time high, there hasn’t been much raised about the subject.

It took another disappointing season at Texas for the Austin American-Statesman to turn in this fascinating piece today on all the red ink that’s being run up by women’s basketball programs.

A total of 28 women’s programs lost in excess of $2 million or more in the 2008-09 reporting period, topped by Kansas, one of three schools reporting deficits of $3 million or more last season.

The other $3M-plus schools are Arkansas and South Carolina, which struggle in the SEC, but these staggering figures aren’t limited to low-profile schools.

Big 12 Tournament champion Texas A & M is close with $2.9 million in losses, and Oklahoma, which plays Stanford in the national semifinals on Sunday, lost $2.6 million last season.

Says Texas women’s AD Chris Plonsky, whose Longhorns reported $2.9 million in the hole last year:

“It’s the same for men’s track and field, and volleyball. I don’t think women’s basketball ought to be singled out more than baseball. . . . Football pays for everything.”

These numbers have absolutely skyrocketed since I first reported in this in 2003 for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the Final Four hit my town. Back then, we were just into seven-figure losses for only a handful of schools.

The Austin newspaper story includes a long list of prescriptions from Plonsky about concerted attempts to improve attendance. Among them is one that both the NCAA and ESPN would fight tooth and nail — going back to letting top seeds play host to first- and second-round games at the NCAA Tournament:

“There’s a lot of us who are concerned about it. You don’t need to turn it into a Cecil B. DeMille production…There has been a mistake in trying to mirror what the men get. Are we there yet? I don’t think so.”

Plonsky goes where few other women’s sports administrators and advocates have dared to suggest. We’re not talking about a recalcitrant old Southern football coach here, but a women’s sports leader who also has overseen men’s sports and like many in her position is grappling with budget and funding issues.

While Texas is hardly a charity case in the world of college sports — Plonsky was the one who made Gail Goestenkors the latest million dollar coach in the women’s game — her concerns are valid.

What she’s talking about is the women’s basketball bubble that’s showing no signs of receding. She says it’s not fair to single out this sport, but frankly its losses are so much bigger than baseball and other so-called Olympic sports.

I don’t want to spoil anyone’s excitement about the Final Four. But as this event is to be played out in a domed environment for the last time for the immediate future, I don’t think there’s a better time to examine why this bubble persists, and why there seems to be a disconnect inside the sport.

While I agree with Plonsky that the push for “equality” in women’s sports on certain levels has not always made sense, I also think what she’s getting at here is so politically unfeasible as to be a non-starter.

In reality, can schools, under the threat of Title IX, not pour so much money into women’s basketball?

They’d be accused of not being fully committed to women’s basketball.

What we’ve been hearing in recent weeks from within the women’s coaching community — including Geno Auriemma — is that there aren’t enough resources, that enough ADs don’t care. They might throw some money around, but there’s little in the way of emotional support to make it work.

In my last post, I wrote that Auriemma is only partially right and questioned whether there’s enough coaching talent for more programs to have a serious shot at UConn-like dominance.

There’s a fair argument to be made that too many schools don’t provide the right kind of resources, especially in promoting and marketing the women’s game. Some programs that have been nationally prominent have been starved of that kind of support for years.

Former Florida and Purdue coach Carolyn Peck, now with ESPN, told me this morning that what she’s noticed is schools throwing a lot of salary money to get a women’s coach, but that’s just about it:

“Just because you pay a coach, doesn’t mean a good recruit is going to come You can attract a lot of candidates if you can show the partnership potential [between the athletics administration and the women’s basketball program.”

It’s incumbent upon the women’s coaching community and Title IX forces to make this distinction, rather than get upset if the dollar figures don’t grow bigger. Commitment isn’t just about how much money is spent, but how wisely it is allocated.

It’s ironic that Oklahoma is back here, 20 years after the program was dropped, and Sherri Coale and the Sooners lack for nothing when it comes to support. But the sobering fact of their financial situation ought to cause some to wonder if women’s basketball will ever be close to turning a profit at more than just a handful of schools.

Sometimes all the marketing and promotions in the world don’t mean that the intended audience is ever going to buy the product. You don’t have to be a women’s hoops basher to feel that way.

While I also want to enjoy a great event with plenty of fantastic storylines, I also can’t get past the sobering reality of the women’s hoops bubble, now on display in a building whose size symbolizes some of that excess.

I’m not saying the sport is too big, but that sometimes its biggest boosters don’t want to acknowledge that it’s not as big as they think it ought to be.

View Original Post at bluestarbb.com

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