Where Do the Mystics Fit in a Rapidly Evolving WNBA?
In January 2024, the NCAA inked a new eight-year, $920 million deal with ESPN for 40 championships, including the Division I women’s basketball tournament—which is valued at $65 million per year.
The deal began this past September, and this year’s women’s tournament will be the inaugural Big Dance under the new package.
The deal has altered the landscape of the women’s game for the better. Women’s basketball alone was valued at about $30 million more than the entire previous NCAA championship package (averaging $34 million annually). It has allowed for more long-form coverage, guaranteed highly visible television windows, and funded a coveted prize money “units” system.
But some media-rights experts tell Front Office Sports the NCAA could’ve gotten even more out of the deal.
“We understand that the NCAA represents lifeblood revenue for the schools, and the schools want a long-term guarantee,” media consultant John Kosner tells FOS. “So by definition, they have a lot of pressure on them and they have to view it conservatively. I just felt that there was more value to be had.”
Kosner, along with media consultant Ed Desser, authored a 2021 report for the NCAA evaluating the women’s March Madness media value. It was part of a broad gender equity report commissioned by former president Mark Emmert after players, coaches, and journalists exposed major inequities between the men’s and women’s tournaments, both played in semi-bubble environments.
Desser and Kosner estimated that, by this year, the women’s tournament could be worth anywhere between $81 million and $112 million on its own. That estimate came before the success of the tournaments over the past few years, and still outpaced the $65 million the NCAA ultimately received.
Desser and Kosner had made several recommendations about the tournament, and how to negotiate its media rights, that the NCAA ignored. “It was clear that there was a solid constituency of those who didn’t seem to be doing much in the way of change,” Desser said of his dealings with the NCAA at the time.
The pair also believed the NCAA declined to make an adjustment that would’ve driven up the value of the tournament altogether: combining the men’s and women’s Final Fours in the same location. Among women’s basketball coaches, the idea was controversial. But some commissioners, like the Big East’s Val Ackerman and Mountain West’s Gloria Nevarez, have told FOS they believed the NCAA should’ve at least given it a try. But the NCAA chose to punt on the concept for at least a decade.
“It locks in second-class citizenship,” Kosner says.
It requires media, fans, and industry professionals to choose between the two events. And the current NCAA sponsorship contract requires that all corporate sponsors buy men’s tournament sponsorships before any other sport—effectively denying opportunities for any brands that want to activate at the women’s tournament but not the men’s.
The consultants also suggested the NCAA spin off the women’s tournament from other championships and sell it as a package itself.
At the time, Endeavor consultants Hillary Mandel, EVP and head of the Americas for media at IMG, and Karen Brodkin, EVP and co-head of WME Sports, told FOS in 2024 that they did conduct an analysis including these options—and spoke with networks outside Disney. But, along with the NCAA, they eventually settled on selling all the sports together. The NCAA appeared concerned that, without women’s March Madness as part of a package, other sports wouldn’t have any bidders. “I wanted the best deal for everybody,” current NCAA president Charlie Baker told FOS in 2024.
But Desser and Kosner say they still believe it could’ve earned more money without being saddled with other, less popular championships. Kosner explained an alternative proposal: selling women’s basketball as a stand-alone with multiple bidders, then selling a package of other top NCAA championships like softball and baseball. That could’ve increased the overall dollar figure.
The other issue with the 40-championship deal: No other network besides ESPN is equipped to take on a package with that much inventory. “If you create a package that only one entity can really bid for, you don’t know the value of it,” Kosner says.
Brodkin and Mandel did note at the time, however, that the price of the deal wasn’t just about women’s basketball. They called the media-rights landscape at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024 “not like we’ve ever seen before,” saying the lack of cash infusion in the market has made doing deals for even popular properties more difficult than ever. Desser and Kosner acknowledged cash-flow difficulties for linear networks, but they noted that new potential buyers, from Amazon to Netflix, have since emerged.
Three months after the deal was signed, even more evidence suggested the NCAA may have undersold it.
The women’s Final Four semifinal matchup between Iowa and UConn averaged 14.2 million viewers, smashing a long list of records. The national championship between Iowa and South Carolina averaged 18.9 million viewers, outdrawing the men’s for the first time in NCAA history—by four million. Overall, the tournament averaged 2.2 million viewers, up 121% from the previous year.
The women’s tournament, therefore, which had just been valued at $65 million, was on par with—or above—the men’s Final Four, part of a package worth about $870 million per year.
“We were mocked endlessly for our audacity to think that the women’s tournament was—we didn’t even say it was the equal of the men, we just thought it was a bona fide event,” Desser says. “We have close friends of ours who we respect in the industry, and they’re from a different generation, but they just dismissed the notion as implausible. And that’s how a lot of decisions get made in the industry. And if the owner of the property isn’t willing to fight their way through that, they get what they deserve. And it’s really unfortunate.”
Ultimately, experts disagree over the deal’s success. Another media-rights expert told FOS the potential value would decrease for non-basketball championships if the package had been split. “It’s hard for me to give the deal a failing grade,” the expert said. “It’s easy to second-guess deals. That’s what we do all day.”
The real test, however, began this week. Experts agree the “Caitlin Clark effect” undoubtedly had an outsized impact on ratings, and that the true test of the sport’s health will come from data from this year and beyond. Even this year, though, women’s hoops is hardly devoid of star power, from USC’s JuJu Watkins and Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo to UConn’s Paige Bueckers. And by all metrics, from new teams to regular-season upsets, the game appears to have more parity than ever.
The tournament growth trajectory will determine which direction the NCAA wants to take the package in the future. In 2032, the governing body will do it all over again.
