Last week I noted the varying media reports on the WNBA's recent TV ratings.

TV ratings may be the best way to measure broad interest in the league. Of course, single data points or simple comparisons can be misleading, because game ratings vary widely depending, among other things, on: (1) which network the game is on, (2) what the lead-in show is, (3) what other networks have on in that slot, and (4) whether the teams playing are from large or small markets.

But if you had regular and complete information, you could filter out the noise and get a good sense of the secular trends.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to find regular and complete information. Nielsen Media is responsible for the ratings, and it doesn't generally make them public because if it did, no one would pay for them.

The league knows its own ratings, but it doesn't generally release them either. Like any other sports league (or just about any other business, for that matter), it maintains a public face of perpetual optimism.

Which means: they generally only release ratings numbers if the numbers look good.

When the press release says, "The Detroit Shock's victory over the Los Angeles Sparks in Game 3 of the WNBA Finals on Tuesday night produced the highest overnight rating ever for one of the league's games on ESPN2," you can get excited about fabulous news.

Or you can get depressed that the ratings for Game 1 of the same series were abysmal, and the even the ratings for Game 3 were far below the ratings from earlier years on different networks.

Armed with my new all-access Lexis password, I set out to find every piece of publicly released WNBA TV ratings info. For the first five years, the league released the average regular season game ratings. Here they are for ESPN and NBC (as reported by the USA Today on 8/28/00 and the SA Express-News on 3/19/02):

1997: 0.8 — 2.0
1998: 0.7 — 1.6
1999: 0.7 — 1.6
2000: 0.5 — 1.4
2001: 0.4 — 1.1

Since then, the league hasn't released this info. But here are a variety of other data points:

1997 Finals: 2.9
1999 Finals Game 2: 1.7
2000 Finals Game 2: 2.1
2003 Finals Game 2: 0.1
2003 Finals Game 3: 0.8
2004 Finals Game 1: 0.2
2004 Finals Game 2: 0.2
2004 Finals Game 3: 0.3
2005 ASG: 1.0
2005 Finals Game 3: 0.7

You can see the glass as half empty (long and substantial decline since the beginning) or as half full (apparent rebound this year).

One thing is certain: the WNBA Finals draw much less fan interest than the college Final Four. The ratings for the Women's NCAA Championship game have been 3.5 or better every year since 2000.