NCAA signs lucrative TV deal for championships, but women’s college hoops stays inside

The NCAA said Thursday it has reached an eight-year agreement with ESPN worth $115 million a year to televise 40 college sports championships annually, including the marquee Division I women’s basketball tournament that many in college sports had hoped would be ready for even bigger competitions. returns given a wave of recent popularity.

The $920 million deal ended several years of speculation and debate about how the NCAA could benefit from an influx of fans in women’s sports, including basketball. Powerful teams love South Carolina And UConn and star players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Sabrina Ionescu have created higher expectations for a sport that has made far less money than college basketball and men’s college football, counterparts that have received much higher investments from universities and media companies for nearly a century.

The NCAA’s current contract with ESPN, which was extended in 2011 and runs through the end of this season, pays $34 million per year and includes 29 championships. A 2021 report, drawn up amid complaints about glaring disparities between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, suggested the women’s tournament could earn at least $81 million in the first year of a new deal — if it were sold on its own and not as a kind of basketball tournament. part of a package deal – although that estimate was met with some skepticism from industry experts due to its ambitions.

Ultimately, the NCAA and ESPN agreed to keep the bundle, valuing the women’s basketball tournament at about $65 million per year under the part of the deal.

NCAA President Charlie Baker acknowledged in an interview that selling women’s basketball itself was not feasible given the realities of the market.

“We said from the beginning that we wanted the best deal we could get for all of our championships,” Baker said The Athletics. “There were a lot of informal conversations taking place with a lot of other potential participants in these negotiations, but the one that was continually involved and the one that I would say was by far the most enthusiastic over the course of these negotiations was ESPN.

“The way they conducted the negotiations showed that this was really important to them, that it remained part of their portfolio. I think they will be a great partner for the future.”

The new contract does not include the highly lucrative Division I men’s basketball tournament; Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery will pay nearly $900 million a year to broadcast that event on CBS and the Turner cable networks in a long-term deal that runs through 2032. The new NCAA-ESPN contract also expires in 2032, giving the NCAA more flexibility in the next media rights negotiations, Baker said. (The NCAA does not control the rights to Football Bowl Subdivision postseason games, and the College Football Playoff conducts its own negotiations and controls its own revenues.)

The new contract takes effect September 1 and includes guarantees that the women’s basketball, women’s volleyball and women’s gymnastics national championships will be broadcast on ABC each year.

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What does the NCAA’s new media rights deal mean for women’s basketball?

A number of prominent women’s basketball coaches, including South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, had advocated for the NCAA to convert the championship into a standalone media deal, like the arrangement used for the men’s basketball tournament.

Last season, the women’s title match aired for the first time on ABC and attracted 9.9 million viewers – and featured the most people to ever watch a men’s or women’s college event on ESPN+. Overall viewership growth increased by 55 percent, and the sport’s stars – players and coaches – became household names. Many in and around women’s basketball expected this reflect recent significant growth in sports by taking it out of a package it shares with dozens of other sports.

“It should happen,” Staley said in March. “We are in a place where we are in high demand. I really believe that women’s basketball can stand on its own and be a huge revenue-generating sport that could, to some extent, do what men’s basketball has done for all those other sports, all those other Olympic sports and women’s basketball.

“We are slowly working on this, because there is evidence in the numbers.”

The NCAA’s media consultants at Endeavor’s WME and IMG Sports said their financial models value the women’s basketball tournament at $65 million annually, which makes up more than half of the new $115 million contract’s value. Hillary Mandel, EVP and head of Americas for media at IMG, and Karen Brodkin, EVP and co-head of WME Sports, said they have begun the process of preparing for the NCAA negotiations by assessing the market opportunity, both for individual sports as well as for the 40-sport bundle.

“Ultimately you have to find the deal that fits your goals and objectives, and not unbundle because everyone tells you, ‘Unbundle! Unbundle! Hey, that’s a cool thing to do!’” Mandel said. “Let’s not get lost in the sauce of that conversation.”

The two sides began serious negotiations in late October, Brodkin said, and finalized the deal during ESPN’s exclusive negotiating window, meaning the NCAA did not take its championship bundle to the open market for a potential bidding war. She said ESPN’s financial investment, existing infrastructure and the “overwhelming amount of production” the network has committed to on both linear and streaming platforms made this the best opportunity for the NCAA. As part of the deal, more than 2,300 hours of championship coverage will be broadcast annually across ESPN’s linear and digital platforms, as well as selection shows from 10 sports.

“Maintaining exclusivity was very important to us in a world of fragmentation,” said ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro.

Thursday’s news serves as another turning point for women’s basketball, although reactions are expected to be mixed. The tournament itself is valued at more than ten times its previous valuation of $6 million to $7 million per year under the current contract, but its extraordinary value has not been fully tested. Still, the increased revenues and new $65 million valuation for the women’s basketball tournament set the stage for future changes in the sport.

The NCAA will explore the idea of ​​rewarding the NCAA tournament success of women’s basketball teams with revenue sharing units, Baker said, a system used on the men’s side of the sport to reward conferences and universities for their performance in the tournament. The Division I board of governors’ finance committee began discussions on that front in 2023 and will talk more with member universities this year, the NCAA said.

“The tournament has grown dramatically because of the hard work of so many student-athletes and coaches and schools and people at the NCAA and ESPN,” Baker said. “Hopefully we can find a way to make this happen.”

Currently, only men’s NCAA tournament teams earn units by advancing in the bracket. Each team that earns a bid to the tournament will earn a unit for its conference, with more units up for grabs based on wins in the tournament. Total revenue from tournament units goes to the conference of the team that earned them and is distributed among the universities over a six-year period. It comes from part of the income that the tournament itself brings in annually. The women’s tournament has not historically generated enough revenue to justify setting aside money for a unit system.

Women’s college basketball reached a big moment during the 2021 NCAA Tournament when the disparity in treatment between men and women became apparent to the public. While those within the sports world had known for years that the NCAA was favoring men’s basketball at the expense of other sports, a TikTok post from then-Oregon center Sedona Prince sparked a much broader outrage and momentum for change.

@sedonerrr

it’s 2021 and we’re still fighting for bits and pieces of equality. #ncaa #inequality #fightforchange

♬ original sound – Sedona Prince

Prince’s tweet was viewed 12.3 million times as the college star pointed out fundamental inequalities and highlighted key differences between the women’s and men’s tournament in food provided to teams, access to weight rooms and even swag bags. Players and coaches also spoke out about other areas that showed how the athletes were treated differently, such as the fact that there were 68 men’s teams compared to 64 women’s, and the use of “March Madness” branding only for the men’s tournament.

Within a week of Prince’s tweet, the NCAA had hired the law firm of Kaplan, Hecker & Fink LLP to conduct an independent equity review of the NCAA. In August 2021, the company released its 117-page review, popularly known as the “Kaplan Report” – of the NCAA’s gender parity within basketball championships. The Kaplan report recommended that the NCAA spin off the women’s basketball tournament separately from other sports, suggesting a higher rating, and said the NCAA had created disparities in the tournaments by having different people work to organize them without proper discuss whether they were comparable. .

Baker and the NCAA’s media rights advisers said they evaluated all possible options, including going to the open market and trying to sell a standalone women’s basketball tournament package, but chose not to.

“If the market had shown us and Endeavor that it would be worth doing that, we absolutely would have gone in that direction,” Baker said.

Several experts from the sector have said this The Athletics last year that it would make the most sense for the NCAA to hold the women’s tournament on ESPN, a partner that broadcasts so much of the sport’s regular season that it would be incentivized to cover the sport leading up to the big postseason event. Brodkin said there would be no better option than an offer to triple their current deal, in addition to increasing investment in production, marketing and storytelling while putting more games on ABC.

“Unbundling for the sake of unbundling – you would have to go through the exercise of who and how is someone going to do more than that?” Brodkin said.

Last season, the women’s title game first aired on ABC, and ESPN announced in October that it would air again on ABC this season — albeit not in prime time. More women’s sporting events could be placed on ABC or in better windows as both sides agreed to meet regularly to consider changes to maximize visibility of events that require it.

(Top photo: C. Morgan Engel/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)