Record, edit, and publish your best content without needing a crew, studio, or complicated setup.

With Riverside, you capture high-quality video and audio, edit it instantly with AI, and turn one recording into clips, posts, and podcasts ready to share. All so you can spend less time troubleshooting tech and more time creating the content your audience actually wants.

Imagine finishing your session by lunch and sharing finished clips before your afternoon coffee. Riverside puts the power of a full studio right on your laptop so you can create faster, sound better, and look professional anywhere.

Use code BEEHIIV at checkout for 1 month free.

Every year, I stand on this soapbox. But this may be the season where I give up the ghost.

I’m talking, of course, about the NCAA women’s basketball tournament’s one idiosyncrasy that is as interesting as it is divisive: hosting the first two rounds at home sites instead of neutral locations.

Most of you get the general idea of this but, if you’re someone that trends more towards WNBA fandom than women’s college basketball, allow me to educate you…

In men’s basketball, the NCAA Tournament works in the following way. 68 teams make it into the general field, and every matchup is hosted at a neutral site. Back in the day, they used to be at individual universities while now, the branding is a little more uniform and city-centric. On the women’s side, the top 16 teams in the country get a little sweetener for a hard fought season, hosting the opening two rounds of March Madness in their own venues.

Sometimes, the crowd fits the moment. South Carolina fans routinely fill up Colonial Life Arena regardless of who’s playing while Gampel Pavilion in Connecticut does the same. Other times, semi-traditional powers struggle to show up and support their own teams let alone the other matchups in their pod.

Several top seeds did fill the seats in their roles as hosts this year. South Carolina, LSU, UConn, LSU, Iowa, Michigan, West Virginia and Minnesota all averaged over 9,000 fans per game. But at other schools including Duke, North Carolina, Vanderbilt, TCU and Louisville, spectatorship was uneven or well below expectation. The two North Carolina schools in this grouping, Duke and UNC, didn’t eclipse 4,000 fans in any of the games in their barns.

This is going to happen, as it’s impossible for every arena to be sold out for every matchup all the way through the tournament. But if the argument for home sites is the accessibility of easy fans for top seeded teams, then does it really look good for the game for a 3 seed to be playing in front of less than 5,000 fans in their own home? Is that really telling a story of a growing sport?

A similar issue presents itself when the host program is not even involved in the other games on site. Some schools package their attendance all into one session (which is why you’ll see similar figures for first round games at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, for example) while others split them by game. Ultimately, if you’re thinking about the NCAA Tournament as a TV product and general advertisement for women’s basketball, empty arenas at home sites don’t seem to do much to feed the notion that this game has true grassroots support beyond the dozen or so schools that really nurture their programs.

In essence, the rich can get richer this way. It’s wonderful if you’re a fan of one of those programs, but is it helping the sport and people’s access to it nationwide? That’s always been the beef against two regional sites, for instance…

Some coaches have long derided the concept, feeling like it takes some of the variance of the tournament out of the equation. After all, it’s a lot harder to beat a favorite in a true road environment versus a truly neutral site. And on top of that, tournament basketball fans are usually leaning towards either a good game or the underdog instead of advocating for the favorite (unless the fanbase travels well). So theoretically, when you put these games at home sites, you’re also adding in a hostile crowd instead of one that a lower seed can feed off of.

With a widening gap between power conferences and mid-majors via NIL and the transfer portal, do we really need to make it harder for them to advance in March Madness? Is it genuinely good for the tournament itself for things to be this chalky? Or are we setting ourselves up for a media environment similar to college football, where we just sort of punt on the season because we know who the last four teams are likely to be at the end of the year?

Here’s the counterargument…

While there are some schools that haven’t been able to crack the code of consistent women’s basketball attendance at their games, the ones that have make the first two rounds electric. Is there anything better than Flau’jae Johnson taking a lap around the PMAC after helping lead LSU to a 68-3 home record in her career, which includes one national championship already? What about Minnesota’s Amaya Battle, who hit a baseline jumper at the buzzer to send the Golden Gophers to the Sweet Sixteen for the first time since the Lindsay Whalen years? You simply can’t put a price on what those moments mean for individual fanbases?

The legendary men’s basketball coach Digger Phelps once talked about court storming through the lens of the memories you make. While anti-stormers have legitimate concern about player and spectator safety in a massive rush like that, Phelps’ view was that those types of events are what make people think fondly of their college years and inspires them to give back when the time comes. In the case of hosting the first two rounds, it’s not too hard to think of a world where Battle’s buzzer beater created a seminal moment for a little girl in the crowd in Minneapolis. Those types of things matter, especially during a time when institutional investment is finally matching the grassroots support of women’s basketball.

If neutral sites for the opening two rounds are to entice both the casual fan and the women’s basketball fan that doesn’t have easy accessibility to high level hoops, then home sites are to reward programs that invest in their fans and see that return in kind. There’s something to be said for the idea that having an incentive for the top 16 teams in the country keeps the regular season interesting and provides stakes that go beyond just being one of the four No. 1 seeds in the bracket. It makes matchups in January and February mean something. It forces you to schedule a little bit harder in the non-conference and, in the case of a team like Minnesota or West Virginia, it can lead to sold out crowds that help propel you to the second weekend.

Tyler, Chauny and Greer have all made great points to me this week that home sites also add a uniqueness to the NCAA Women’s Tournament that makes it markedly different than the men’s version of March Madness. And maybe the goal shouldn’t be uniformity across college basketball and instead embracing the uniqueness of this tournament.

So what are we to make of the idea as a whole?

It has less to do with West Virginia and Minnesota specifically but I think both of those schools have shown this year the utility of home site matchups. Both programs had fanbases that showed up en masse and made the selection worth it. It’s great to see non-traditional power programs have games and moments that foster lifelong fandoms. And maybe we need to think about accessibility to those moments in a different way.

My argument has been that women’s basketball is getting popular enough that neutral sites can live on an average of 5,000+ fans if you’re strategic about where you place these games. Just look at Unrivaled rolling up to Philadelphia this year. The novelty of women’s hoops coming to town is a legit thing and I believe that in the middle of a golden generation of players, the American viewing public will respond in kind. Maybe there’s just as much merit to the idea of allowing individual programs to grow via these types of events and matchups. It may only seed one fanbase instead of potentially multiple, but I’m coming around to the idea that maybe that’s the reward we should be prioritizing.

If nothing else, maybe we can settle on a compromise. Home sites stay, but we bring in the March Madness floors to all the arenas. There’s been some debate on the men’s side of this too but I personally love uniform NCAA March Madness floors. It just feels and looks like a tournament setting and feels like a departure from the regular season. When you take the games to home sites and the only real iconography you have to signify it’s March are a couple of logos between the three point line and midcourt. Give me the tournament look for TV but keep the home sites. If we can mix the pomp with the uniqueness, we can end up with something truly special.

But at the very least, I’m willing to come off the stoop. While the variance of bad environment to good environment may be a bit wider in the women’s game, home sites do provide something unique and can give us something different. And even if that means less upsets in the first two rounds, at least we get some shining moments all the same.