Emmert claims progress, not close on women’s pay

MINNEAPOLIS — A year after glaring inequities were revealed at the women's NCAA Tournament and less than two weeks after sharp criticism from Congress, NCAA President Mark Emmert declared Wednesday that he was happy with the institution's progress but said there had only been “preliminary discussions” about distributing tournament revenues to women's programs.

Emmert said the work ahead improving conditions for women's basketball includes negotiating a new television contract for the women's tournament and potentially having a similar revenue distribution protocol as the men's event.

Emmert was careful not to call for specific changes ahead of discussions by the NCAA's hundreds of member schools, and he declined to offer his own viewpoint.

“It's up to the schools and what they want to do in that regard,“he said at the site of the women's Final Four in Minneapolis. “It's a complicated relationship because the championships on the men's side, the relative weight of moving forward in the tournament has been diminished over time.

Those in the membership who think there shouldn't be that much emphasis on winning in the tournament.”

Sending money to the women's programs is something coaches have been clamoring for. Men's conferences receive hundreds of thousands of dollars per tournament game involding one of their teams, money they then redistribute to schools. There's no such system on the women's side.

Emmert said adopting such a payment structure won't be a quick fix and will require approval from several NCAA committees.

“There's really only just preliminary discussions about it,” he said. “I would hope those are decisions that can be made within the next calendar year, for example. If by this time next year there's some notion of a direction to go in, that would be great.”

Emmert said that wouldn't mean it could be implemented immediately.

“There's no reason why they couldn't start that debate and that discussion,” he said. “But it is a very challenging debate among the schools. Once you start talking about how you're going to divide resources, then those are difficult.”

It's easier to pay the men thanks to the NCAA's deal with CBS and Turner. The original contract averaged $770 million per year with an extension in 2016 jumping that per-year average to $1.1 billion in 2025.