The NCAA has made another move that puts the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament on similar footing to the men.
Beginning this year, women’s basketball teams will accrue “units” for their conference based on performance in the NCAA Tournament, the NCAA announced on Wednesday.
The system will be similar in nature to how men’s teams are financially rewarded based on NCAA Tournament success, though the women’s payouts will be substantially less, commensurate with the media rights value attributed to the tournament.
Just like with the men’s tournament, women’s teams will be awarded one unit for each game played. So a team reaching the Sweet 16, for instance, would earn three units. Those units are then paid out to the team’s conference, who redistributes the money to its member institutions. Traditionally, this revenue was redistributed evenly to each school in a conference, though some conferences have recently moved to unequal distribution models to reward teams who earn more units.
Units for the men’s tournament equate to about $2 million each and is based on the event’s eight-year $8.8 billion media rights agreement with Paramount (CBS) and Warner Bros. Discovery (TNT, TBS, truTV). The women’s tournament rights are tied up in ESPN’s recent eight-year $920 million deal with the NCAA which includes all 40 collegiate championships aside from men’s basketball and the College Football Playoff. The women’s tournament is valued at $65 million per year in that deal, or approximately 56% of the total package.
Given the large discrepancy between the men’s tournament’s media revenue ($1.1 billion per year) and the women’s tournament’s media revenue ($65 million per year), the unit payouts for the latter will not be nearly as lucrative. Per the NCAA announcement, the pool of money for women’s tournament units will reach $25 million in the 2027-28 season, at which point it will increase by 2.9% annually, just like the men’s tournament. At that point, NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament units will be valued at approximately $200,000.
While a tenfold discrepancy between the value of men’s and women’s tournament units may seem like a lot, the women’s tournament’s fund actually makes up a greater proportion of its media rights revenue than the men’s.
41% of the media rights revenue generated from the women’s tournament will be paid out in units, while just 24% of the men’s media rights revenue gets paid out.
While the payouts from the women’s tournament won’t be as significant as the men’s tournament to the overall bottom line of athletic departments, it’s still a meaningful moment in women’s sports.
The women’s basketball tournament has shown itself to be a viewership juggernaut in recent years. Last year’s championship game beat out the men’s final with the boost provided by Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes. With the continued growth of the sport, it only makes sense to start treating it the same as the men from a financial perspective.
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