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

The NCAA on Thursday announced a new eight-year, $920 million media rights agreement with ESPN, a contract that will keep 40 championships bundled together through 2032. The women’s basketball tournament remained part of that television bundle; it was not spun off for a separate media rights package like the men’s tournament agreement.

Here’s what you need to know about the new NCAA media deal and what it means for women’s college basketball and other NCAA sports:

What is the biggest takeaway from this new agreement?That women’s basketball was packaged with other sports and not sold on its own like the men’s tournament, which generates nearly $900 million per year in revenue through the NCAA’s deal with Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery to televise the men’s tournament on CBS and the Turner cable networks.

As women’s basketball has broken viewing and attendance records in recent seasons and continues to grow, coaches widely argued that their championship — like men’s basketball and football — should stand on its own. Instead, it was grouped with 39 other championships, including the highly popular women’s volleyball championships, and the softball and baseball College World Series events.

The coaches, nearly unanimously, had expressed fear that if women’s basketball was not sold on its own, the sport would never independently prove its profitability and that old assumptions would perpetuate the oft-repeated idea that the women’s championship loses money annually and is not actually valuable.

What are the pros and cons of this deal?Pros: NCAA president Charlie Baker said the deal values women’s basketball at $65 million per year, about 10 times more as it is currently valued under its deal that ends with the 2023-24 season. That is a significant jump.

Additionally, ensuring the title game will be on ABC, among the most widely distributed broadcast networks in the United States, in each of the next eight seasons is a guarantee that didn’t exist in the previous deal. Sticking with ESPN means the NCAA will continue working with a partner that has experience covering a sprawling event like the women’s March Madness, which hosts games at 17 locations during its first week.

The eight-year contract also expires at the same time as the current men’s NCAA Tournament deal, which could open up opportunities for the two sports to go to market together in 2032, much like the shared media deals of the LPGA and PGA.

Cons: Coaches, players and fans will see the bundle as a negative because there was a large push to have the women’s tournament go to market as a standalone entity. Additionally, the eight-year deal is significantly longer than some within the industry expected.

A shorter deal would have also retained the flexibility to go back to market sooner and capitalize on the continued growth rate in the sport.

Why did the NCAA see ESPN as its best partner?ESPN had a lot of bargaining power in this negotiation, and the deal was done during the network’s exclusive negotiating period for a reason, once ESPN offered to triple the current rights fee. Few platforms have the proven bandwidth, personnel or experience to pull off airing an event like March Madness. Even if the championship had become a standalone entity on the free market, garnering interest from another platform like Apple TV+ or Amazon Prime, NCAA president Charlie Baker would have had to consider the potential drawbacks of handing this off to a media entity that has never done this at such scale before.

ESPN knew that. And the NCAA needed to weigh that level of risk into the equation.

ESPN also has been the most committed regular-season partner for the NCAA, as evidenced by its broadcasts of women’s basketball games through regular seasons and conference tournaments. The networks are already publicizing the women’s NCAA Tournament in their broadcasts and studio shows. If another entity got the championship rights, would ESPN market the postseason in the same way? Of course not.

Why has this been such a prominent conversation in women’s basketball?Women’s basketball players and coaches knew long before the 2021 NCAA Tournament that the NCAA treated them much differently from their counterparts in men’s basketball, especially when it came to March Madness. However, during the pandemic that postseason, those inequities became blatantly obvious to the general public.

From inside the women’s basketball tournament bubble in San Antonio, then-Oregon center Sedona Prince posted a TikTok, which has racked up 12.3 million views, displaying the discrepancies between the women’s weight room and the men’s weight room. (The men’s tournament was being held in Indianapolis.)

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

♬ original sound – Sedona Prince

Prince’s social media post, and subsequent comments from players and coaches alike, called out other areas of inequality from the NCAA. Sixty-eight teams in the men’s field versus 64 in the women’s, the use of “March Madness” branding being limited to the men’s tournament, the differences in team gifts during the tournament — these examples prompted a groundswell of outrage and support that bolstered women’s basketball’s argument for equity.

Within one week of Prince’s post, the NCAA hired the law firm Kaplan, Hecker & Fink LLP to conduct an independent gender equity review of the NCAA. In August 2021, the firm released its 117-page findings on the NCAA basketball championships. The report has become known as the Kaplan Report.

What did the Kaplan Report find?The report laid out what many had long witnessed or assumed: The NCAA’s commitment to maximizing the value of the men’s NCAA Tournament as the primary funder for the NCAA had created, normalized and perpetuated gender inequities.

The report was damning in several ways, including noting that the nonprofit NCAA didn’t have “structures or systems in place to identify, prevent, or address those inequities.” But the biggest talking point became the report’s independent analysis of what the women’s tournament broadcast rights were actually worth — somewhere between $81 million and $112 million on its own. (Other industry experts disputed that figure, and the Kaplan Report didn’t explain the methodology beyond saying it used an independent media expert.)

The NCAA’s current deal with ESPN, struck in 2011 and running through August 2024, bundled women’s basketball with 29 other championships at a value of $34 million per year. The NCAA said it considered women’s basketball’s value within that deal to be between $6 million and $7 million.

How much has women’s college basketball grown recently?The last five years have seen major growth in women’s college hoops. It was only in 2021 that ESPN began broadcasting every NCAA Tournament game. Up until 2019, the network used regional windows during the first and second rounds.

In 2022, the national title game between South Carolina and UConn drew 4.9 million viewers, which had been the best viewership for a women’s championship game since 2004.

Last season the title game was moved to ABC and LSU-Iowa pulled in 9.9 million viewers, setting a new mark for the most-viewed women’s college basketball game. The network also set viewership records for the Sweet 16, Elite Eight, Final Four and title game, averaging a 55 percent increase in total viewership.

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LSU vs. Iowa draws record 9.9 million viewers

The surging popularity of the sport has had an impact on attendance as well, as schools have seized on momentum to create special one-off events such as the top-10 showdown between Iowa and Virginia Tech at the Ally Tipoff and an Iowa-DePaul outdoor exhibition game dubbed the “Crossover at Kinnick” that set a single-game women’s basketball attendance record with 55,646 fans.

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Iowa women’s basketball sets attendance record with game at Kinnick Stadium

What does this mean for sports like women’s volleyball, women’s gymnastics, softball and baseball?They’re in the same boat as women’s basketball. It’s clear that ESPN is valuing their growth, but it’s also obvious that the NCAA still thinks the best way to achieve its goals of promoting and broadcasting all of its sports, outside of men’s basketball, is by packaging them together. In the spring, when the NCAA hired Endeavor to help determine whether the women’s basketball tournament should remain bundled with all other championships, some athletic directors also asked that other growing sports receive similar consideration.

Executives at Endeavor told The Athletic that they looked at all options as they began the process, starting with a blank page of paper and no predetermined outcomes. But they found that it was better business for the NCAA to keep the sports tethered and to get ESPN to commit more resources to its programming, including the guarantee of 10 selection shows to promote a good portion of sports whose postseasons it broadcasts. Storytelling is important, and the more the NCAA’s broadcast partner can educate its audience about the players participating in its tournaments, the more likely it is that new fans watch the games.

ESPN is guaranteeing that the national championship games in women’s basketball, women’s volleyball and women’s gymnastics will be broadcast on ABC each year, which is huge for visibility and continued growth. Those sports have seen record viewership in recent years, which has already led to more linear opportunities in the regular season and the opportunity for championship events to be broadcast by ABC.

In addition to the records set by women’s basketball last spring, the 2023 NCAA women’s gymnastics championship final on ABC was the most-watched live women’s gymnastics telecast ever on ESPN platforms. And the 2023 NCAA women’s volleyball championship on ABC set a TV viewership record for the sport, averaging 1.7 million viewers opposite Sunday NFL games. The new deal guarantees additional ABC exposure within the overall softball and baseball championships as well; both sports have performed well in recent years, with the Women’s College World Series championship series topping the Men’s College World Series final this past spring.

(Photo: Joe Robbins / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)