Could Las Vegas be home to Women’s College Basketball World Series?
NCAA president Mark Emmert’s comments Wednesday that the organization is ready to rethink its ban on postseason events in Las Vegas has sparked a lot of conversation about the possibility of NCAA tournaments coming to town.
Apparently there’s more than just smoke to this fire as UNLV athletic director Tina Kunzer-Murphy said later in the day that the she is helping to spearhead the proposal that would lift the ban on Vegas because of gambling concerns.
Now comes a story published this week in the Washington Post that this renewed talk of lifting the Vegas postseason ban was born out of a plan pushed by NCAA women’s basketball coaches to raise their visibility of their tournament.
The Post’s Dan Steinberg reported this week that Debbie Antonelli, who is a longtime women’s basketball analyst and former Division I player and administrator, pitched a unique idea last spring: Create a week-long culmination of the women’s basketball tournament in Las Vegas.
“There’s a number of us, people all over the country, just trying to get people to look at this in a different way, with the idea being it’s the right time to kind of change this format, to put women’s basketball on a whole different stage,” Antonelli told the post.
Her plan has its roots in the baseball and softball College World Series. Working with former UNLV athletic director Jim Livengood, Antonelli proposes:
* Bring all of the Sweet 16 teams/Elite Eight/Final Four/title game rounds to a Vegas arena, such as the new Las Vegas Arena.
* Play the final four rounds of the tournament in the same week, encompassing as many as nine days. That includes possibly changing the tournament to include round-robin bracket play, similar to the College World Series.
* Encourage point spreads and gambling on the games at Vegas sports books to enhance interest in the event, according to Antonelli.
“If there’s a line on the game, that means someone wants to place money on it, and that means there’s interest,” Antonelli said. “Now, if that demographic’s not important — if 18- to 35-year-old men are not important — then we don’t need to worry about it. We don’t need to do anything. But I sense that’s the demographic we’re always talking about. We’ve got the other demographics, but that’s the largest chunk in sports, the 18- to 35-year-old male.
“So how can we capture them? We have to make the games more interesting and entertaining, so we have to get better offense. What else would be interesting to that 18-35 demographic? If there’s a line on the game, because they’re going to pay attention to that line. And if that helps grow our game and it’s done in a legal way, why wouldn’t we look at it?”
Imagine the likes of Notre Dame, UConn, Stanford, Tennessee — all the elites of women’s college basketball — converging on Las Vegas for a week. It’s a plan so wild that it might just work.
Bill Bradley is Sports Editor of the Review-Journal. He can be reached at bbradley@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2909. Follow on Twitter: @billbradleylv