For the first time since the NCAA began organizing a female basketball tournament in 1982, a deep race for the group will produce more than boast of rights or a championship banner.
The money is also at stake.
Each game that plays a school among the first four to the Final Four, which makes the championship game do not count, will win what the NCAA calls a “unit”, essentially a portion of annual television income brought from the agreement of the rights of the NCAA media to transmit the tournament. The NCAA will pay all the units obtained by the members of a conference during a women’s women’s tournament, which then divides the money group and redistributes it to schools over the next three years.
At stake this year there are 132 units worth $ 15 million combined, which means that if the number 1 in general, UCLA, advances to the championship game, will win the Big Ten conference Ten $ 1.3 million to pay through 2028. (The conferences use different methods to decide which schools receive how much). This pool available for tournament equipment will grow to $ 20 million in 2026, $ 25 million in 2027 and increase in 2.9% per year. funds.
There is a reason why NCAA landed in this units based system: it is the same that has been used to reward male teams in the NCAA tournament since 1991.
Between 1997 and 2018, the combined units won by the male teams of the Big Ten Conference only raised an estimate of $ 340 million, according to a 2019 analysis by Associated Press.
During the same period, meanwhile, female basketball teams, including Powerhouses Connecticut, Tennessee and South Carolina, Zilch won.
Among the numerous sports books written by Andrew Zimbalist, professor of Economics at Smith College, is the “unpaid professionals: commercialism and conflict in university sports” of 1999, in which he argued that the NCAA adopted a payment system based on units for units for female basketball. Zimbalist told NBC News that when Myles Brand was the president of the NCAA from 2003 to 2009, he had spoken with Brand about the repair of what he called the discriminatory disparity that he saw to the male teams, but not to his homologous women’s homologues, he paid his performance.
“He never had any justification,” Zimbalist said.
More of the NCAA Tournament
Why did it take 34 years to fix? The argument for a long time against such movement, that the male tournament attracted more spectators and, therefore, was more valuable, ignored that the women’s tournament also attracted millions of spectators too, and could have attracted even more if it had been marketed equally to men, Zimbalist said.
“He would never have been saying that women should be paid zero, because women in fact attracted customers and income,” he said.
That 34 -year -old gap among the first tournament payments for men and women was why in January, when an NCAA council approved a fund to begin payments, Danielle Donehew, the executive director of the Association of Women’s Basketball Trainers, described it as a “transcendental victory” that was “the culmination of decades of hard work.”
That victory came, in part, due to the pressure. In 2021, women’s basketball players participating in the NCAA tournament documented on social networks the disparities on how they were treated compared to men, from miserable weight rooms to bad gift bags. With the players who are agitated by dealing and the public asking questions, the NCAA hired a law firm to carry out a gender capital evaluation. The findings, thrown in 2021, were scathing.
“The transmission agreements of the NCAA, the Corporate Sponsorship Contracts, the distribution of income, the organizational structure and the culture prioritize the male basketball of the division I about everything else so that it believes, normalizes and perpetuates gender inequities,” wrote the firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP.
The NCAA instituted some changes immediately, such as allowing the women’s tournament to finally use “March madness” in its marketing, after previously limiting its use only to the male tournament. Four years after the Kaplan report, there were signs last summer that units -based payments would arrive at female basketball. And when they were officially approved in January, NCAA tried to reward women according to an equal or better standard than men, whose units earnings are paid for a period of six years.
The fund that pays units in the Women’s Basketball Tournament is limited to $ 15 million this year because it represents 26% of the annual income of the NCAA of the media rights agreement that it signed with ESPN to transmit the women’s tournament, the same percentage of male teams resorted in 1991. The teams of men in the tournament currently require a light percentage of annual income, approximately approximately 24%.
Even so, the total money set available to be earned by male teams in the tournament this year is more than $ 200 million more than the female pool. When a unit in the women’s tournament will be valued at around $ 114,000 this year, a unit in the male tournament is worth around $ 2 million.
The reason? Television.
It was not a coincidence that male teams began to obtain payments in 1991; That year, CBS began a six -year agreement, valued at $ 1 billion at that time, to exclusively transmit the male tournament.
The income of the rights to convey the male basketball tournament of Division I has been shot since then. Only last year, the NCAA agreement that gives CBS and Turner the rights to convey the male basketball tournament brought $ 950 million, the lion’s participation in the revenues of the $ 1.3 billion of the NCAA, according to the financial statements. Next year, the agreement will only pay NCAA more than $ 1 billion, bringing more in a year that the NCAA will be paid throughout the lives of its current eight years and $ 920 million with ESPN to broadcast the women’s basketball tournament along with the championships of more than 20 NCAA sports.
The NCAA could have broken the women’s basketball tournament in its own media rights agreement, but chose to keep it as part of a larger package. The female tournament of that package is valued at approximately $ 65 million annually, said the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, to the AP last year.
“Yes, it’s a package,” Baker said at that time, “but it is a larger package and it is a larger package that will be much better.”
Promoted by the popularity of the then superstar of Iowa, Caitlin Clark, in front of Dynastic South Carolina, the Women’s NCAA championship game last year attracted a record of 18.7 million viewers, 4 million more than the game for the male title, which makes it the most watched basketball game since 2019, including the NBA.
“If you want to return to this historical argument and say: ‘Oh, we must remunerate according to the value they create’, then women should be paid more this year than men, not 1/15 the value of men,” said Zimbalist. “For me, it is road theft. It is the worst example of exploitation of the women you can imagine. So they wait 34 years, and then they finally give crumbs. And I don’t know what Charlie Baker believes he is doing, but I think it’s totally unacceptable.”
If the enormous difference in the value of the units between the male and female tournaments can be known until 2032, when the rights of the media are for both tournaments that are then presented to the offer. Emboacar the Women’s Basketball Tournament in that package with other NCAA championships that underestimated the women’s tournament, according to the Kaplan 2021 report, whose analysis suggested that the rights for the female basketball tournament could only have been sold for $ 81- $ 112 million in 2025. However, the NCAA chose to maintain female basket big.
“The final question would have been in the mind of the NCAA and the mind of its consultants is:” OK, if we sell the NCAA Women’s Tournament with all other events, we will get X. If we sell only the women’s tournament and the other championship events, we will get x more Y. Well, that number will be bigger than if we only sell them together? “,” Said Bob Thompson, an old TV in the Fox Executive. Signature, Thompson Sports Group.
“And they could face the possibility that someone says:” I want the female tournament, I don’t want anything else, “and then those events are sitting there alone, and anyone really will go for them” and for the NCAA, it is extremely important that those events see the light of day and are on television, and it is as wide as possible, which is why I am happy with the treatment and treatment of ESPN and the ESPN.
Experts are watching to see in the future if the NCAA will turn the women’s tournament in its own media rights package, combine it with the male tournament or keep it in a package.
Within female basketball, the drastic value difference between payments of men and women is observed. But having them at all, as of this year, was described by Duke coach Kara Lawson, in January as a “step forward that is really valuable.”
“If your sport proves to be a money manufacturer in this environment,” Lawson said, “all the components of that sport are rewarded.”
