Does Domination of A Sport Help or Hurt Popularity?

The L.A. Times profiled the UConn Huskies Women's Basketball team, the overall top seeded team in the women's Final Four and three games away from their 6th national championship in 15 years. They are also 13 games away from tying the all-time winning streak record, established by John Wooden's UCLA Men's Basketball team.

The story poses and interesting question: does too much winning hurt a sport's popularity?

Are the Huskies good enough to be considered America's most dominant team? "They're making a case for consideration," Burke said.

But their success raises another question: Are all those blowout victories hurting a women's game that must fight for respect and attention?

Even [TV sports analyst Billy] Packer, who admires their style, concedes: "To be quite honest with you, because so many of the teams they play have no opportunity to be competitive, I don't watch many of their games."

[UConn Coach Geno] Auriemma offers a different perspective. He talks about Microsoft's dominance of the computer software market.

"Eventually, other people have to catch up," he says. "You either compete or get out, so everyone will compete."

It's hard to think of teams that have been as dominant in recent history, but I'd tend to think that assigning low-popularity to over-dominance is a pretty flawed claim. It's not like people stopped watching the NBA during the Bull's two Jordan-led three-peats from 1990-93 and 1995-98. And the dominance of Tiger Woods clearly single-handedly exploded the popularity of golf-as-spectator-sport.