During class my blog group consisting of Erik Mathis, Mike Slonoff, Stephanie Gebers, C.J Watson, and myself were discussing such things as the coverage of women's sport specifically the Final four of college basketball on television.
We first discussed that women's basketball games are still not getting the right amount of coverage on sports as they should be getting. We noticed that tournament games and regular season games of the women's NCAA final four are usually only showed on ESPN, rather than a top network such as ABC, or NBC and looking at the other spectrum more men's games are broad casted over those bigger networks. We also pointed out that men's games have so much more pregame, halftime, and post game talk than women's.
Although we did all agree upon together that the Men's final four, is more popular than the women's final four, they should still have the same television rights as each other. If networks other than ESPN showed more women's coverage we felt as if this would help the popularity of women's basketball, this could cause a snowball effect which could possibly lead into filling the stands at women's games, and having those pre and post game shows that Men's basketball has.
One of the ironies about your suggestions is that back in the 1970s, when the AIAW was governing women's sports, Women's Basketball was on the verge of signing some very lucrative television contracts with major networks. There is speculation that perhaps that was one reason why the NCAA became so interested in bringing Women's sports under NCAA governance. I definitely agree with you that the women should "still have the same television rights" as men.
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