It’s not hard to imagine a future in which this past week is seen as one that changed women’s basketball.
The NCAA championship Sunday represented the biggest television audience ever for a women’s college game. It spurred discussion that kept going for days: The conversation about LSU forward Angel Reese and Iowa guard Caitlin Clark represented a rare instance of women’s basketball capturing sustained, mainstream attention (which made it all the more unfortunate that so much of the dialogue had to rebut ugly double standards around who gets to talk trash and why). The tournament featured some jaw-dropping highlights and broke attendance records. And it’s hard to have asked for all this at a better time. The NCAA is just a year away from the chance to break out the women’s tournament as a candidate for its own stand-alone television deal for the first time—a long-awaited opportunity to demonstrate its value.
Yet it would be a mistake to see this as just a single moment. None of this attention is isolated. Instead, the current momentum is the product of consistent, steady growth.
Just take the answer from South Carolina coach Dawn Staley when asked during the tournament about the opportunity for the women to get their own television deal.
“It should happen. We’re at that place where we're in high demand. I do believe women’s basketball can stand on its own,” Staley said. “I do believe we were probably at a place years ago, but until [we] were able to have the decision makers give us that opportunity—I think it’s a buildup. It’s slowly building up to that, because there's proof in the numbers.”
The present moment is its own, born of increased parity, a growing drive for structural change and a consistent stream of stars who are singular players and personalities such as Reese and Clark. But it’s been a long time coming, and for all the coverage of the current stars, the sport wasn’t ever in need of a savior.
Last year ESPN crowed that viewership for the national championship game had increased 18% year over year. This year? For the first time, they aired the championship game on ABC, the biggest available platform, and the viewership increased so much as to blow previous numbers out of the water. (The 9.9 million viewers shattered a record that had stood for two decades: 5.6 million had watched the 2002 championship between undefeated UConn and Oklahoma.) It was unprecedented for a women’s game. A large part of that was the unique pull of The Caitlin Clark Show. But it was far more than Clark and her Hawkeyes. Viewership was up throughout the tournament, round by round, and even regular-season viewership this year on ESPN increased by 11%. The growth potential here was on display all season—and last season, and the one before and so on.
Some of that momentum has built quickly. This is just the third year in which every tournament game has been on national television. It’s just the second year in which the women have been granted use of the term “March Madness.” But it’s on top of groundwork that was laid far more slowly. Yes, much of this came from the 2021 gender equity review commissioned by the NCAA after glaring disparities in the tournament that year. But that followed the white paper that Big East commissioner Val Ackerman put together for the NCAA in ’13—which featured many of the same recommendations that the gender equity review would include. And they weren’t new then, either. “In many cases, the comments received were tinged with frustration, as it was noted that some of the ideas now being discussed have been ‘kicking around for years,’ demonstrating the difficulty of making change within the NCAA system,” Ackerman wrote.
The stars have been there. It’s just that mainstream attention and investment haven’t. And this applies to the discussion around trash talk, too. C’mon: This is the sport that saw the Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi destroy a locker room door after losing in the 2021 WNBA Finals and then saw the victorious Chicago Sky put said door on their parade float. The women’s game has a fine tradition of trash talk, and it’s a disservice to its practitioners. (If it’s easier to find in the WNBA, it’s only because it has room to thrive in college ball, too.) Yes, the dialogue is expanding, but it’s ahistorical to suggest that its ideas are completely new.
As for that television deal? The NCAA has traditionally handled broadcast rights by putting football and men’s basketball up for their own television contracts while other sports have their championships bundled into a group. The association agreed to its last group deal with ESPN more than a decade ago—which includes an annual women’s basketball payout of $34 million (for comparison, CBS and Turner reportedly paid some $900 million to broadcast the men’s tournament). But there’s reason to believe the sport could be worth much more if it were allowed to stand on its own. The 2021 gender equity review estimated the women’s tournament would command a deal with an annual payout between $81 million and $112 million.
The NCAA has signaled that it will consider pursuing a stand-alone deal for women’s basketball after the current group contract expires next year. The sport’s leaders say it’s ready.
“I don't think any of us are asking for it to be just like the men,” UCLA coach Cori Close said before the Elite Eight. “Obviously, they're ahead of us in that deal. But I do think it's the next right step.”
Close is the president of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association. In that role, she’s tasked with advocating for the women’s game, and she’s found herself running into the pernicious idea that women’s basketball wants to take resources and attention from men’s basketball. That’s not the case, she says: Instead, women’s basketball can now bring in money on its own, and everyone can benefit. That goes for the potential for a television deal and, coaches hope, a unit distribution model. In the men’s tournament, conferences are paid out in “units” for each tournament win by a member program. There’s no such arrangement for the women. A new television deal, and a unit distribution system alongside it, could help change the game.
“I think that sometimes, it’s a myth that gets out there that we’re looking to slice the pie, and we want to take a bigger slice of the pie,” Close said. “That is actually false. We want to look through the media distribution model and through broader investments, through corporate sponsorship and investment that way—we want to grow the pie.”
