The NCAA announced a new eight-year, $920 million media rights agreement with ESPN on Thursday, a deal that calls for 40 championships bundled through 2032. The women's basketball tournament remained part of this television package; 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 most important takeaway from this new agreement?
That women's basketball was bundled with other sports rather than sold individually like the men's tournament, which, through the NCAA's contract with Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery to televise the men's tournament on CBS and Turner, generated revenue of nearly $900 million a year generates cable networks.
As women's basketball has broken attendance and viewership records in recent seasons and continues to grow, coaches have 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 wildly popular women's volleyball championships and the softball and baseball College World Series events.
Coaches had almost unanimously expressed fear that the sport would never be able to independently demonstrate its viability unless women's basketball was sold on its own, and that old assumptions would perpetuate the oft-repeated notion that the women's championship loses money annually when, in reality, it does not Case is valuable.
What are the pros and cons of this deal?
Advantages: NCAA President Charlie Baker said the deal values women's basketball at $65 million per year, about 10 times more than it currently does under the deal, which ends with the 2023-24 season. This is a significant leap.
Additionally, ensuring that the title game will air in each of the next eight seasons on ABC, one of the most widely-watched networks in the United States, is a guarantee that did not exist in the previous contract. Sticking with ESPN means the NCAA will continue to work with a partner that has experience covering a sprawling event like women's March Madness, which has games at 17 sites in the first week.
The eight-year deal also expires at the same time as the current men's NCAA Tournament contract, which could open up the possibility for the two sports to launch together in 2032, similar to the LPGA and PGA's joint media deals.
Disadvantages: Coaches, players and fans will see the package as a negative as there has been a strong push to launch the women's tournament as a separate entity. In addition, the eight-year contract is significantly longer than some industry representatives expected.
A shorter contract would also have preserved the flexibility to re-enter the market sooner and benefit from the sport's continued growth rate.
Why did the NCAA consider ESPN its best partner?
ESPN had great bargaining power in these negotiations, and the deal was made during the network's exclusive bargaining period for a reason, as ESPN offered to triple the current rights fee. Few platforms have the proven bandwidth, staff or experience to broadcast an event like March Madness. Even if the championship had become a standalone entity on the open market and attracted interest from another platform like Apple TV+ or Amazon Prime, NCAA President Charlie Baker would have had to consider the potential downsides of handing it over to a media company that would has never done this before on such a scale.
ESPN knew that. And the NCAA had to factor that level of risk into the equation.
ESPN was also the NCAA's most committed regular season partner, as evidenced by its broadcasts of women's basketball games in the regular seasons and conference tournaments. Networks are already highlighting the women's NCAA tournament on their broadcasts and studio shows. If another company won the championship rights, would ESPN market the postseason in the same way? Of course not.
Why was this such an important conversation in women's basketball?
Women's basketball players and coaches knew long before the 2021 NCAA Tournament that the NCAA treated them very differently than their men's basketball counterparts, especially when it came to March Madness. However, during the pandemic postseason, these injustices became apparent to the general public.
From within the women's basketball tournament bubble in San Antonio, then-Oregon center Sedona Prince posted a TikTok that drew 12.3 million views, highlighting the discrepancies between the women's weight room and the men's weight room. (The men's tournament was held in Indianapolis.)
@sedonerrr
It's 2021 and we're still fighting for a bit of equality. #ncaa #inequality #fightforchange
♬ Original sound – Sedona Prince
Prince's social media post and subsequent comments from players and coaches drew attention to other areas of inequality from the NCAA. 68 men's teams versus 64 women's teams, the use of March Madness branding limited to the men's tournament, the disparity in team gifts throughout the tournament – these examples sparked a wave of outrage and support that the Women strengthened basketball's case for justice.
Within a week of Prince's post, the NCAA hired the law firm Kaplan, Hecker & Fink LLP to conduct an independent review of gender equity in the NCAA. In August 2021, the company released its 117-page NCAA Basketball Championship results. The report became known as the Kaplan Report.
What did the Kaplan report find?
The report laid out what many had long observed or suspected: the NCAA's commitment to maximizing the value of the men's NCAA Tournament as the NCAA's primary funder had created, normalized and perpetuated gender inequalities.
The report was damning on several counts, including finding that the nonprofit NCAA did not have “structures or systems in place to identify, prevent or address these inequities.” The biggest source of discussion, however, came from the report's independent analysis of what the broadcast rights to the women's tournament were actually worth – somewhere between $81 million and $112 million alone. (Other industry experts disputed that figure, and the Kaplan report did not explain the methodology other than to say it used an independent media expert.)
The NCAA's current deal with ESPN, signed in 2011 and running through August 2024, bundles women's basketball with 29 other championships worth $34 million per year. The NCAA said the value of women's basketball under this deal would be between $6 million and $7 million.
How much has women's college basketball grown recently?
There has been strong growth in women's college education over the past five years. It wasn't until 2021 that ESPN began broadcasting all NCAA Tournament games. Until 2019, the network used regional windows in the first and second rounds.
In 2022, the national title game between South Carolina and UConn drew 4.9 million viewers, which was the best viewership for a women's championship game since 2004.
Last season, the title game moved to ABC and LSU-Iowa drew 9.9 million viewers, setting a new record for the most-watched 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.
GO DEEPER
LSU vs. Iowa draws a record 9.9 million viewers
The sport's growing popularity has also impacted attendance, as schools have used the momentum to host one-off special events such as the Top 10 showdown between Iowa and Virginia Tech at the Ally Tipoff and an Iowa-DePaul outdoor event Exhibition game named “Crossover at Kinnick” which set a single women's basketball attendance record with 55,646 fans.
GO DEEPER
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 values their growth, but it's also obvious that the NCAA still believes that the best way to achieve its goals of promoting and broadcasting all of its sports outside of men's basketball is to to summarize them. When the NCAA hired Endeavor in the spring to help decide whether the women's basketball tournament should remain bundled with all other championships, some athletic directors also said other growing sports should receive similar consideration.
Endeavor executives told The Athletic that they explored all options at the start of the process, starting with a blank page of paper and with no predetermined outcomes. However, they concluded that it would be better for the NCAA to tie the sports together and get ESPN to devote more resources to its programming, including guaranteeing 10 selection shows to promote a majority of the sports' postseasons she radiates. Storytelling is important, and the more the NCAA broadcast partner can educate their audience about the players participating in their tournaments, the more likely new fans are to watch the games.
ESPN guarantees that the national championship games in women's basketball, women's volleyball and women's gymnastics will be broadcast on ABC every year, which is huge for visibility and continued growth. These sports have seen record viewership in recent years, which has already led to more linear regular season opportunities and the possibility of ABC broadcasting championship events.
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 telecast of women's gymnastics on ESPN platforms ever. And the 2023 NCAA Women's Volleyball Championship on ABC set a TV viewership record for the sport, averaging 1.7 million viewers for NFL games on Sunday. The new contract guarantees additional ABC exposure also within the entire softball and baseball championships; Both sports have performed well in recent years, with the Women's College World Series championship series leading the Men's College World Series finals last spring.
(Photo: Joe Robbins / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)