NCAA basketball

2022 - 3 - 18

March Madness Faced a Gender Reckoning. Now Everyone Gets a Pasta Station—but What Else? (unknown)

The NCAA has a list of everything that will be different about the Division I women's basketball tournament this year. It's the smallest entries on the list ...

Per the report, “holding a joint Division I men’s and women’s basketball Final Four in one location over a single weekend would be the best, and likely the only way to reduce the existing gender inequities seen in Division I men’s and women’s basketball.” (When the NCAA initially responded to the scandal over the tournament last year, it claimed the discrepancy between the men’s and women’s tourney budgets was because the men brought in money while the women annually lost $2.8 million—but it backed up that number by saying that the television rights payment brought in by the women was just $6 million. Even the tourney selection show—which had traditionally been held on Monday, but was moved this year to Selection Sunday, the same as the men—saw a big spike: 1.1 million viewers, representing a 160% increase from 2021. And: The women will have a yogurt bar and a pasta station to match the men’s yogurt bar and pasta station. “The time is now,” Close says. The men’s tournament has a massive deal with CBS and Turner, whose latest extension was for eight years and $8.8 billion. But there are still questions around what that will actually mean—namely, whether it will involve more of the moves recommended in the gender equity review conducted by the law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink, and if so, which ones and when. The NCAA has a list of everything that will be different about the Division I women’s basketball tournament this year. The coaches had long felt there were striking disparities between the men and women. A year after the NCAA met with controversy for its disparate handling of the men’s and women’s tournaments, it announced a suite of moves designed to change the experience. But that still leaves plenty of questions about structural issues with the tournament. Those questions stand out to a coach like Close. She is the president of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association—putting her at the helm of one of the biggest groups that has been pressing for change over the last year.

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Image courtesy of "Front Office Sports"

The Battle for Equity in NCAA Basketball (Front Office Sports)

The NCAA has improved how it operates the women's tournament, but not all structural inequities have been rectified.

The Kaplan report suggested negotiating a new tier of sponsors for women’s basketball specifically, but the NCAA hasn’t done that, either. CBS/Turner only own broadcasting rights to the men’s tournament — but they own the rights to the entire NCAA corporate sponsorship program until 2032. Duke athletic director and Division I Women’s Basketball Committee Chair Nina King told FOS the committees want to see how existing improvements play out first. There’s no such distribution for the women’s tournament. The basketball performance fund is a $169 million pot that’s distributed based on how far teams advance. “There are so many companies and individuals, like philanthropists, who want to pour money into women’s sports.” But it didn’t. When partners buy in, they’re required to buy rights to the men’s tournament. But ultimately, the process is overseen by Emmert, who arguably already has a track record of underselling NCAA media properties. The app is now a hub of game and bracket content, rather than just a place to store Final Four tickets. But the NCAA hasn’t yet fixed many of the systemic problems that are holding back long-lasting equity and growth — ones that require a far larger commitment than equal swag bags and newly minted social media handles. The report’s media rights expert, Ed Desser, estimated the women’s tournament alone could be worth between $81-$112 million annually in 2025. And the progress they’ve made is important.

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