The NCAA wants more money from TV. Maximizing that can prove to be tricky.
For more than 20 years, fans of college sports like softball, baseball, women’s basketball and more than two dozen others have known just where to find NCAA Championships – on ESPN’s spectrum of channels.
The arrangement has worked well for both sides: The NCAA ensured its top athletes perform on a national stage, and ESPN added hundreds of hours of live programming to a college sports portfolio anchored by college football and men’s basketball games.
A sign of how comfortable the NCAA and ESPN were with their partnership came in 2011, when they agreed to a 13-year, $500 million extension without the NCAA ever taking the rights to the market.
But with that deal set to expire in a year’s time, it’s increasingly likely that the next media rights deal for those 31 championships will look very different from the current one, which has been widely criticized as undervalued – especially due to the big event. , the Division I women’s basketball tournament.
Charlie Baker, who took office as the NCAA’s new president in March, spoke of the upcoming negotiations, emphatically acknowledging at a college sports symposium last week that “we’re dramatically underperforming a slew of other monetization opportunities.”
The increased interest in women’s basketball has increased pressure on the NCAA to sell those tournament rights themselves rather than with other championships. According to one analyst, this could bring in about $100 million annually. However, such unbundling could risk leaving other sports on lesser-known platforms.
And while the women’s basketball tournament, with record attendance and ratings, hits the market at a seemingly opportune time, the industry is in turmoil as broadcasters make a transition from cable, which continues to bleed subscribers, to streaming. platforms, which still have a much smaller audience.
There’s a lot for the NCAA to consider. Have interests changed at ESPN, whose parent company Disney is in the process of cutting 7,000 jobs? What about other networks, such as CBS and NBC, which have fewer cable networks but have fledgling streaming platforms? And can streaming-only companies such as Apple, Amazon and YouTube, which have started selectively acquiring sports rights, be players?
The NCAA declined to make Baker or any other official available for an interview, saying in a statement it is “open to all new and creative ideas — including potentially standalone contracts — to raise revenue to keep student-athletes and all sports running. growing, including women’s basketball.”
The NCAA has hired Endeavor, a global sports media company, to help develop its strategy for negotiations, which have not yet begun. Baker has said he expects a rights deal to be finalized around the end of the year.
“The NCAA is a very political organization and you live in a different political world than you did 10, 15, 20 years ago when these deals were made,” said Chris Bevilacqua, a sports media analyst who previously advised the NCAA. about media rights. “There are 500,000 NCAA student-athletes, and half are women, so there will be a lot of political pressure to design something consistent with that narrative of investing in women’s sports.”
That pressure stems from a 2021 NCAA basketball gender equality review, which was conducted after widespread differences were identified between the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments during the pandemic.
In the report, Ed Desser, a sports media analyst, estimated that had the rights to the women’s tournament alone been sold, they could have raised between $81 million and $112 million for the 2025 tournament.
ESPN paid nearly $50 million for the 31 championships this year, including the women’s basketball title game, which drew a record 9.9 million viewers on ABC.
“The value has only increased” since his assessment two years ago, Desser said in an interview. He cited not only the increased focus on the women’s tournament, but also the increasing interest in women’s professional basketball and soccer leagues.
Still, the surge in interest in women’s sports hasn’t necessarily translated into an explosion in rights fees. In football, for example, FIFA President Gianni Infantino threatened blackouts in several European countries from matches of this summer’s Women’s World Cup. before a deal was closed this week. Broadcasters were hesitant to meet FIFA’s asking price for the games, which were sold as standalone properties for the first time. Previously, they were bundled with the rights to the men’s World Cup.
The history of women’s basketball over the past 30 years is littered with peaks and plateaus. Connecticut’s emergence as a Tennessee counterpart tied in with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where the United States raced to the gold medal, a dominant run that helped start the NBA-backed WNBA a year later.
By 2012, interest in the college sport had stagnated to the point that the NCAA commissioned Val Ackerman, the first president of the WNBA, to investigate ways to boost interest in the game.
During the pandemic, when many sports were shut down, the murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of social activism in the United States. The WNBA and women’s college basketball leaned on that, questioning many differences from the men’s versions of their sports, including the unjust weight rooms (and coronavirus testing) at the 2021 NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments. there was another cause: the detention of WNBA star Brittney Griner in Russia.
This all happened amid the relaxation of NCAA rules prohibiting athletes from signing endorsement agreements. That cemented the personalities of the college’s top female players, who, unlike the men, don’t get into the WNBA until they turn 22 (in their draft year) or graduate from college. In recent years, players such as Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers, Aliyah Boston and Caitlin Clark have become nationally known.
“We said it might take a generation” to gain a foothold, Ackerman said of the start of the WNBA. “Now the question for me is whether this atmosphere can be exploited commercially? Will there be more tickets at higher prices? Will sponsors pay higher rights fees? That’s the test here. That’s what gets marketed.”
However, this is a complicated time to go to market.
While cable subscriptions continue to decline and emerging streaming platforms continue to build subscribers, cable viewers continue to outnumber streaming viewers. (ESN is in 72.5 million homes this month, according to Nielsen; ESPN+ has 25.3 million subscribers, a spokesperson said.)
Such uncertainty is likely to shorten NCAA deals.
Mike Aresco, the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference and former executive of CBS and ESPN, said media companies generally preferred ten-year or longer contracts so they could focus on building the broadcasts rather than rebuilding them. negotiate the rights.
But long-term deals have left the Pac-12 and Atlantic Coast conferences far behind the Big Ten, whose 2017 decision to renew its media rights for just six years netted a nearly $7 billion seven-year deal starting this football season. . . It’s also hard to predict what the streaming and cable world will look like in five years, let alone ten.
“Everyone is reconsidering how far we will go,” Aresco said. “It’s not an exact science. In fact, it’s probably more art than science.”
Even if the money ends up in the same place — eventually flowing back into the college coffers — media rights deals at conferences are fundamentally different from what the NCAA will sell. A conference deal extends over a season, while the NCAA sells playoffs or championship events, which are condensed into a matter of days or weeks.
The women’s basketball tournament has another compelling selling point: It runs for three weeks in March and early April, a window when most broadcasters crave content. There’s little else between the Super Bowl in mid-February and the Masters golf tournament and the start of the pro basketball and hockey playoffs in mid-April other than the basketball tournaments. The rights for the men’s tournament are owned by CBS and Turner.
“The women’s basketball tournament is the top-rated event on ESPN between mid-February and mid-April,” said Desser. “That is important, especially in a world where monthly subscriptions are becoming increasingly popular. People didn’t decouple from month to month, but now you have to have something competitive to stay in decision making.
The upcoming negotiations will be unlike those of a professional sports league, despite the increasingly professional nature of college sports.
For example, the NFL can be expected to get every last dollar out of a deal. The NCAA, even as Baker insists the governing body needs to get better at raising revenue, will have other considerations.
“It’s a principled conversation,” said Julie Roe Lach, the Commissioner of the Horizon League and a member of the NCAA’s Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee. “It can’t just be monetary. It can’t be as simple as which network is going to give the most money. There must be a genuine commitment to growing the game.
In an era where athletes can monetize endorsements, she added, such growth could hinder a broadcaster from helping athletes reach wider audiences through media other than television.
Roe Lach is among those who believe that disconnecting from women’s basketball offers opportunities for other sports to grow on their own.
Perhaps the College Baseball World Series appeals to the MLB Network, or another network could get behind a niche sport, as the SEC Network has done with its Friday night gymnastics broadcasts that helped boost the sport’s popularity in the South.
Julie Cromer, Ohio University’s athletic director and co-chair of the committee that rewrote the NCAA’s bylaws last year, believes Olympic sports are natural candidates for raising their profile. She pointed to her time in Arkansas, where the university’s indoor track and field team drew several thousand fans for their home games, prompting the university to live stream its events.
The NCAA, she said, could act as an incubator.
Many of these sports have a dedicated fan base, and getting the product to that fan base doesn’t always have to be achieved through linear broadcasts,” said Cromer.
One of those sports would be lacrosse. Far down the sporting food chain, it has an anchor in the Northeast, but a decades-long push westward has been slow. When ESPN broadcast the men’s and women’s championships back-to-back on Memorial Day, it gave the event a grand appearance.
“Lacrosse has been looking for that for a long time,” said Joe Spallina, the women’s coach at Stony Brook University whose regular-season game with top-ranked Syracuse was featured on ESPNU. “That’s one of the problems with growing sports: everyone wants to get to the top right away.”