From the mailbag:

It's my impression that women's basketball is the third most popular collegiate sport behind football and men's basketball, and ahead of hockey, baseball, softball and a myriad of individual sports. Is that true?

I don't know that there's any determinate way to answer that question, but I suppose it is true, depending on how you measure.

Measuring by attendance is hard because different sports have a varying numbers of teams and games. But here are some rough attendance rankings, totals and averages:

1. Football: 33 million - 45,000
2. Men's hoops: 23 million - 5,200
3. Women's hoops: 6.7 million - 1,600

The NCAA doesn't calculate totals for other sports, so you can only look at the leader tables. Men's hockey probably has a higher average attendance, but a lower total due to fewer schools. Here are some numbers for softball, baseball, women's soccer, men's soccer, and women's volleyball. All of those seem to have lower totals and averages.

Thus, if you look at attendance, women's basketball is either third or fourth (behind hockey), depending on whether you're talking about total or average.

Television ratings might be a better gauge of overall national popularity. One arbitrary but roughly accurate method is to look at the rating of the most recent championship game:

1. Football: 14.7
2. Men's basketball: 11.0
3. Women's basketball: 4.3
4. Hockey: 1.0.

These numbers obviously fluctuate from year to year, but they would have to move dramatically for women's hoops to be something other than third. I can't find ratings for other college sports, but I assume they are in the range of hockey or lower.

In short, I think it's fair to say that women's basketball is a distant third in terms of overall popularity behind football and men's basketball.