Madness isn’t in March
It turns out that the governing body of collegiate sports is beset not only with antediluvian sexism but also with an air ball of a business strategy.
The NCAA’s March Madness—a branding mechanism for the Division I men’s basketball tournament that gratuitously excludes the women’s final— turns out to be a year-round act of financial insanity that has likely deprived the organization of tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
Those are among the damning conclusions of a comprehensive report, prepared at the NCAA’s behest by the law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, that lays bare the hidebound institutional thinking and policies that for decades have contributed to entrenched gender inequality in college sports. Yet even as the Kaplan report recommended steps that would help reset the badly tilted playing field between men’s and women’s collegiate basketball, an enterprise worth well over $1 billion, it said it harbored grave doubts about the NCAA’s “willingness and ability” to make critical reforms.
The irony of pushback from the NCAA is that the reforms would make a start toward aligning its business model with its business interests. As the report makes clear, they have been badly out of whack for years owing to the NCAA’s not-so-benign neglect of the women’s basketball tournament, whose budget is a third that of the men’s. The result was an embarrassment to the organization this year when the stark disparities came to light between the men’s and women’s tournament—in food, training facilities, playing venues, gifts for the participants, even coronavirus testing.
Granted, the men’s basketball tournament is the much bigger moneymaker, a cash cow whose television rights and sponsorship deals account for nearly three-quarters of the NCAA’s $1 billion in annual revenue, according to the Kaplan report. But by according the women’s tournament third-class treatment, the NCAA has left money on the table—piles of it. According to an expert enlisted by Kaplan, a contract to broadcast the women’s tournament would be worth at least $85 million annually in 2025. At the moment, under a contract barely renegotiated in years, the NCAA’s yearly take from the event’s television rights is less than $6 million.
The failure to capitalize financially on the women’s game has resulted in paltry revenue distributions to colleges and sent a loud message of indifference from collegiate sports’ male-dominated hierarchy. That in turn has disincentivized colleges from investing in their women’s basketball programs, the Kaplan report said.
Viewership for the collegiate men’s basketball championship title game, although it remains large, has shrunk significantly since 2015; in the same span, the audience for the women’s title game has expanded swiftly. The NCAA, caught napping, needs to up its game.