I will admit I was probably pulling a bit for the Irish. But the truth is, the women's game (and the men's also) must find a way to get more teams involved in the elite 8, final 4, and championship games.
I believe one of the attendance issues across the country is that everyone knows that at the end, the same 6 - 7 teams will be in the last alive. Oh, some team will break in (like SC this year), but they can never win it all.
UCONN and Notre Dame are the two biggest issues in this. But you can likely name the others too.
A perfect example of the problem is the committee consistently gives the benefit of the doubt to these same teams. Stanford and Duke were both given the home game in the 1st 2 rounds over us. Mostly because of their reputation and history. You could make all kinds of arguments of why the 2nd place team in the top RPI conference (by 4 games) could be given the edge in that call. To break the cycle, they are going to need to give those kind of (truthfully hard to know what is right) edges to up and coming teams.
The cycle must be broken.
