NCAA to start handing out units for women’s Tournament
Women’s basketball, it seems, is no longer just having a moment. The sport arrived and then drilled itself into the American sports psyche.
Monday night, Iowa vs. LSU averaged 12.3 million viewers, according to ESPN, making the Elite Eight matchup the most-watched women’s game on record. Caitlin Clark is the risen tide that has lifted all boats. Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese are also household names, and JuJu Watkins is on her way. For now, though - despite a ton of progress - schools still get zero dollars for their women’s teams participating and advancing in the NCAA tournament.
That is starkly different on the men’s side, where “units” are awarded to conferences for each game played, then distributed to member schools. Through the units program, the teams in the men’s Final Four - Connecticut, Purdue, Alabama and North Carolina State - already have earned approximately $10 million each for their conferences to be paid out across the next six years (starting in 2025).
What have South Carolina, Iowa, Connecticut and N.C. State earned their conferences and themselves by making the women’s Final Four in Cleveland? Nothing.
But with the NCAA’s new television deal with ESPN, units should come to women’s basketball in the near future, possibly by next year’s tournament. NCAA President Charlie Baker has said as much. The media contract, signed in January, is for eight years and $920 million, including women’s basketball and a list of nonrevenue sports. Women’s basketball is valued at $65 million per tournament, roughly 10 times more than in the contract that ends this year.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if.’ I think it’s ‘when,’” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said Wednesday. “To me, it shows the maturation of an incredible game and the growth that we’ve all benefited from. Now, how do you execute it? Where do the dollars come from? How do you assess what the units are worth, et cetera? To be having these types of conversations, it’s reflective of the elevation of women’s sports.
“But this has to be the beginning of those talks, not the end. There’s a lot more to address.”
A loose road map for potential implementation, according to an NCAA spokeswoman: The NCAA’s finance committee is workshopping models for a women’s tournament units program. Some key questions, among others, are when it would start, what the value of each unit would be and how and when they would be paid. For example, the NCAA could decide to start payments in the same year that units are earned (rather than waiting a year as on the men’s side).
Later this month, after the tournaments wrap, the finance committee is expected to meet with the women’s basketball oversight committee and the Division I women’s basketball committee, which runs the tournament. NCAA officials are also crowdsourcing with conference commissioners because conferences would control the payouts. It will be a frequent topic of conversation in Cleveland. That would put the finance committee on track to finalize a proposal by August.
After that, because this deals with revenue distribution, it would require a full Division I membership vote at the NCAA’s conference in January. And if the vote passes, units could be offered for participation in the 2025 tournament.
“Give us the units. Why shouldn’t we have the units, right?” Lindsay Gottlieb, USC’s women’s coach, said at the tournament site in Portland, Ore., this past weekend. “The direct investment - people like money. They like return on investment. People are starting to see that women’s basketball is not just a values proposition, although it’s great theater and it’s great entertainment, but there’s also a monetary aspect to it.”
In any conversation about women’s basketball units, it’s important to understand how they work for the men. The NCAA pays out 132 units per men’s tournament, one for every game played by a team. That means every squad that makes the tournament earns a unit for its conference. So far, the Connecticut, Purdue, Alabama and N.C. State men’s teams have earned units for making the round of 64, round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite Eight and Final Four.
Last year, the SEC led the pack with 17 units. The units are then paid out across the next six years, meaning this year conferences are earning on units from 2018 to 2023 (excluding 2020 because the tournament was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic).
For that five-year span, the ACC led with 83 units, good for $28.4 million in payouts. Each unit for the current tournament is expected to be worth a bit under $2 million. They will be divvied out between 2025 and 2030. Most conferences, such as the ACC, distribute the money evenly across all teams. But there are exceptions. Gonzaga, for example, earns more money per unit than other schools in the West Coast Conference. That was negotiated when Gonzaga threatened to leave for the Mountain West in 2018.
Yes, the details get a bit in the weeds. But the takeaway is that schools have a clear financial incentive for their teams to excel in the men’s tournament. Adding that to the women’s side should lead to even more investment in a booming sport.