Women’s basketball teams finally will be paid for playing games in the NCAA Tournament each March just like the men have for years under a plan approved Wednesday at the NCAA convention.
The unanimous vote by NCAA membership was the final step toward a pay structure for women playing in March Madness after the Division I Board of Governors voted unanimously for the proposal in August.
Now, so-called performance units, which represent revenue, will be given to women’s teams playing in the tournament. A women’s basketball team that reaches the Final Four could bring its conference roughly $1.26 million over the next three years in financial performance rewards.
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In the first year, $15 million will be awarded to teams out of the fund, which is 26% of the women’s basketball media revenue deal. That will grow to $25 million, or 41% of the revenue, by 2028. The 26% is on par with what men’s basketball teams received the first year the performance units program was established.
This will start in March in the 43rd year of the women’s NCAA Tournament. The lack of a units system for the women’s tournament has been a point of sharp criticism.
“It’s great women’s basketball is getting the long-deserved financial reward for NCAA postseason success,” Louisville coach Jeff Walz said.
The women’s March Madness plan is similar to the men’s basketball unit program. Each of 32 conferences that receive an automatic bid to the tournament will receive a unit, and additional units will be rewarded for teams that receive at-large bids to the 68-team field.
The longer a school’s tournament run lasts, the more units the school’s conference receives. Conferences decide the distribution of unit revenue to each of its members. Each unit was worth about $2 million for the 2024 men’s tournament.
Men’s basketball teams now receive 24% of the media rights deal, which is $8.8 billion over eight years, starting this year. Women’s basketball is valued at $65 million per tournament in the NCAA’s new media rights deal with ESPN — roughly 10 times more than in the contract that ends this year.
The women have a higher percentage of the media revenue deal to bolster the value of each performance unit.
The NCAA sharing March Madness revenue with its member schools has long been a feature of the men’s tournament. The 2018 tournament, for example, brought in $844.3 million in television and marketing rights, the vast majority from a contract with CBS and Turner Sports to televise the games.
Most of the money flows through the NCAA to conferences and then back to member schools, more than 300 of which field Division I basketball teams eligible to play in the tournament. The schools mostly reinvest in athletics, from scholarships for athletes in all sports to coaching salaries, training facilities, stadiums, ballparks and arenas.
The women’s tournament is coming off its most successful year ever, which included a record audience of 18.7 million for the title game won by South Carolina over Iowa, the highest for a basketball broadcast of any kind in five years.
It outdrew the men’s championship game — UConn winning its second consecutive title with a victory over Purdue — by nearly 3 million viewers. The women’s tournament also had record attendance.
Reporting by The Associated Press.
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