New on Sports Illustrated: Is 2021's Neutral-Site Experiment a Blueprint Forward for the Women's NCAA Tournament?

Neutral sites aren't a full-time thing during a typical women's NCAA tournament. Should they be?

The NCAA’s “bubbles” for its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments were established to block the threat of a tourney derailed by COVID-19. For the women, however, there’s one curious side-effect—it’s the first time that every game has been played at a neutral site.

That’s not new for the men. (Though those neutral sites are usually sprinkled around the country for the early rounds, rather than one giant site for the entire tournament, as is the case this year.) But it’s different for the women, who typically play the first and second rounds on the home courts of the higher seeds, before switching to four regional sites for the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight and then converging in one city for the Final Four. Which means that this year’s experience stands out and sparks a question: Is there a way to make more neutral sites work for the women’s tourney?

“I’ve always been a believer that the national tournament should be played on neutral sites,” says Iowa coach Lisa Bluder. “I’ve had the benefit of hosting in the first and second round—in fact, we broke the NCAA record for most attendance in the first and second round at over 23,000 people (in 2019). I know the benefit of that. But I don’t believe it’s fair … I think what we’re seeing right now is it can be done.”

The NCAA did try to use a variation on neutral sites for the first two rounds of the women’s tournament from 2003 to 2014. (The sites were selected ahead of time, but there was no rule preventing the bracket from assigning a team to play at home, if its stadium happened to be one of those “neutral” sites—which is different from the men, who are prohibited from playing at home, even if its stadium has been selected as a host site.) But after struggling to consistently achieve solid attendance with some of the neutral arenas, the women’s tournament scrapped that model and went with the current system, where the higher seed hosts the early rounds.

To play at neutral sites would theoretically make the early rounds fairer—getting rid of home-court advantage and encouraging the idea that any team, no matter how low-ranked, can win. But it would require sufficient fan engagement to work.

“I think a lot of it depends on whether the fan interest is great enough that it’s worthwhile doing,” says UConn coach Geno Auriemma. “If you could guarantee it—if you could say, hey, listen, if you have these things at neutral sites, the fans will show up, I’m all for it, and I think that would be great for the game ... The big question I think everybody has is: Can you do it?”

In the past, the answer seemed to be no.

“We’ve tried that,” Baylor coach Kim Mulkey says of potentially trying a tournament that incorporates more games at neutral sites. “And no one shows up at the games.”

But

women’s basketball fandom is growing—this is the first year that every game in the tournament is nationally televised—and the fact that a neutral-site model couldn’t be sustained in 2014 doesn’t guarantee that the situation will be that way forever. And this year’s tournament is sparking some interest in a different model that could tap into the existing fandom and help grow it even more: picking one neutral site for the tournament that starts with the Sweet 16, rather than the Final Four, as it does now.

Commentator Debbie Antonelli has advocated for this model for more than a decade. She calls her idea “Sweet 16 to Vegas”—the opening rounds could be played as they are now, at the home courts of the higher seeds, but the entire tournament would move to a destination city like Las Vegas for the Sweet 16. It’s “for the fan as much as for the competition of the student-athletes and the coaches,” she says.

“Everything I’ve suggested is with the fan in mind,” Antonelli says. “So that on Christmas morning, if you want to gift your family a hotel and an airplane ticket and tickets to a game, you’ll actually know where your team would be going. Right now, you have to wait until Selection Monday, and then they have to win the first two games, and then you have to see if you can actually join your team in the Sweet 16.”

In a normal, non-pandemic year, the four regional sites that host the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight tend to be tilted toward the locations of the top seeds. “I don’t believe it’s fair in the Sweet 16 to be playing in regionals that are in somebody’s backyard where they don’t have to travel a long way,” says Iowa coach Bluder. This idea from Antonelli would get rid of that dynamic—and give women’s basketball an opportunity to have one site, year after year, to market to fans as its own.

She compares that to the College World Series, which has top teams around the country host early tournament rounds before the final eight meet in Omaha, or the Women’s College World Series, which does the same with Oklahoma City. In both cases, the city has developed a strong reputation as the home of the sport, and fans make yearly pilgrimages to watch.

What that fan relationship could look like with women’s basketball in Vegas, or any other city, is an open question. But the underlying structural piece—can it work to host teams all in one place before the Final Four?—has been answered this year in San Antonio.

“I go back to Debbie Antonelli’s idea,” says Bluder, who likes the idea of fully neutral sites from the beginning, but would embrace this model, too. “We could be playing a Sweet 16 all at one place in one neutral site. We’re seeing it right now. And it’s working.”

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