Few Options For Viewing 2009 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tourney

The 2009 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament, like any 64-team tournament, holds the promise of many interesting games. Games that will be competitive. Games featuring teams I want to watch. This tournament is touted by ESPN as having all the games available. Well…perhaps for some.

This year, as with most years, I get to watch the games in the best-of-the-four-currently-being-played style (on EPSN2) that has become a standard. Trouble is, they almost never focus on the game I want to watch in my region—living in NM, we get stuck watching a lot of Mountain West and Pac-10 (yawn, mostly). I had high hopes this year as ESPN360 has been trumpeted as having all the games online. Well, that’s all fine and good if you have access to an ISP that has signed one with ESPN360. In my area, Comcast hasn’t, and Verizon high speed isn’t available. So…I’m stuck with whatever crumbs ESPN2 tosses my way.

As you well know, I loves me my Terps. With Maryland a #1 seed, that pretty much guarantees a blow-out game, so it’s all but assured that Maryland will be lucky to get 5 minutes of screen time. I’ve danced this dance before with ESPN, so I’m quite jaded on this score.

To add insult to injury: CBS is giving full free access to all of the men’s games. That’s fine, I suppose, if you like men’s basketball.

Honestly, I think ESPN has been dropping the ball when it comes to covering women’s basketball. FOXsports (yes, that bastion of male-only-rah-rahs) does a much better job at coverage. I’d say that FOXsports has broadcast the vast majority of games I’ve watched. That percentage would have improved if Comcast showed all of the Fox Sports Networks (as DirecTV does), but they only have three regional networks. I’m going to miss so many WNBA games because of this limit (grrrr).

So…ESPN, next year free up the online content. You don’t get any ad revenue if cripple access to content.

Comcast…expand your Fox Sports channel offerings. Your competition is DirecTV and you are really dropping the ball with sports fans.