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The 2016 NCAA men’s championship game, which is scheduled to be played on Monday, April 4, is not expected to beat last year’s 28.3 million viewers. This is not because of lack of interest in the game or the teams playing, but rather because of deals the NCAA has reached with cable networks.

This year will be the first time in decades that the two Final Four games and the championship game will not be broadcast on a free TV network. The NCAA has reached a lucrative deal that gives Turner Broadcasting System’s pay TV channels, TBS, TNT, and TruTV, the exclusive rights to broadcast these pivotal games. This means that only viewers who pay for cable subscriptions will be able to watch the games on TV. Viewers who do not subscribe to cable will be out of luck.

The sports industry in general has been changing in recent years, signing deals that restrict viewership for competitions. Sports organizations reach deals with pay TV channels to increase revenue. However, this comes at the expense of relationships with fans who are unable to watch and leads to declining TV viewership of sports in general. With more and more customers canceling their cable subscriptions in favor of streaming TV online, the problem may only get worse.

TBS and its sister channels broadcast the Final Four games for the first time in 2014. The ratings were significantly lower than they were when fans could watch the games on CBS. The Duke-Oregon game that was shown on TBS on March 24, 2016 had the highest ratings of any show on cable, but it had less than half the number of viewers who tuned in for NCAA games broadcast on CBS on other days.

When boxing adopted pay-per-view, its fan base declined significantly. Ratings for the recent NFL Pro Bowl game, which was shown on ESPN, were the lowest ever. With pay TV channels assuming the rights to many local baseball teams’ games, TV viewership of the sport has been declining.

In some cases, fans who want to watch games are unable to do so because their cable providers have not been able to reach deals with sports organizations. Comcast customers may not be able to watch Yankees games this year if the cable company does not reach an agreement with the YES Network soon. Disagreements among several TV providers in California may prevent fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers from watching them play on TV.

In-person attendance at NCAA basketball games has been increasing in recent years. In the 2014-2015 season,
32.5 million fans watched student athletes compete in Division I, II, and III games. If you are an NCAA basketball fan, you can still get last-minute tickets to games from CapitalCityTickets.com.

Odyssey Sims — *By (c) Jerry Molaver [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons*

Journalists who write about college basketball and fans who want to fill out their brackets rely on statistics collected during games, analyzed, and posted online to assess players’ performance, compare teams, and make decisions on what topics to write about and which teams to support. While there is a wealth of detailed information available about male college basketball players and teams, the data is often less in-depth when it comes to women’s basketball. Fortunately, some websites are trying to change that.

Websites such as Sports-Reference.com and shotanalytics.com offer detailed information about pace, point differentials, and many other statistics about men’s teams. The information collected about women’s performances tends to focus on more basic components, such as points, rebounds, and blocks, and less on the in-depth analysis that is found for men’s basketball.

Some journalists, such as Sue Bird from The Players’ Tribune and Howard Megdal from Excelle Sports, have written about the disparity between data on men’s and women’s basketball and have said it limits the types of stories they can write about the sport. They have called for more detailed information about women’s performances in basketball.

Some sources are trying to bridge the gender gap. Basketball-Reference.com shows the usage rate and true shooting percentage for female basketball players. ESPN has statistics available on women’s basketball. That data is organized in the form of leaderboards, and the top 50 teams can be searched and sorted. The NCAA’s website is also a good source of data on women’s basketball with information on Division I, II, and III teams. Its archives include national statistical rankings going back to 2000 and a team and player national rankings summary starting with 2002. The site also includes Final Four records stretching back to 2001.

WBBState.com was until recently a go-to source for detailed information about women’s basketball. It collected and shared data such as usage, true shooting percentage, adjusted team rankings, and other detailed statistics. The website went offline on February 29, leaving journalists and fans without the ability to use its detailed information. The company that provided server space to data company National Statistical, which ran the site, took its equipment offline.

Want to see men’s and women’s NCAA basketball games live? Get to the court with tickets from CapitalCityTickets.com.

If You Can’t Watch Final Four Games on TV, See Them Live

Websites Try to Close College Basketball Data Gender Gap

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