The NCAA Might Have Screwed Itself Over With Iowa’s Tough Regional

The success of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark has helped lead to a huge surge in popularity for women’s basketball this season. The superstar has boosted ticket prices, attendance, and TV ratings while breaking NCAA scoring records and hitting logo threes.

All of which means that from a business perspective, the NCAA—which scheduled Iowa’s first game not for prime time but for 2 p.m. CT on Saturday—has turned the entire tournament into a high-stakes bet by giving Iowa arguably the toughest regional of the four No. 1 seeds.

Pac-12 tournament semifinalist UCLA, which fell to eventual champion USC in overtime, sits at No. 2. Defending national champion LSU comes in at No. 3. Kansas State, which went 1–1 against Iowa this year, is the No. 4. And Colorado, which stunned preseason No. 1 LSU in the first game of the season, is the five-seed. However far Iowa goes, it will have more than earned its way.

Of course, the selection committee should not have intentionally given Iowa a breezy path to the Final Four for ratings’ sake. And women’s basketball, which saw surging postseason attendance and viewership not just in the Big Ten but across conference tournaments, is not reliant on one player or team. But given the way the opaque selection process accounts for qualitative as well as quantitative factors, it’s puzzling why the committee would choose to put the team bringing it the most money on the hardest path to the championship.

If the Hawkeyes do survive the gauntlet of their regional, Clarkonomics is sure to follow them to the Final Four. After such growth during the regular season and conference tournaments, there’s no telling what kind of records Clark could help set championship weekend. Last year’s ratings record helped lead to a larger media-rights deal for NCAA championships including women’s March Madness, tripling the price of the previous agreement. Iowa and LSU fans sold out last year’s national championship game, while semifinal ticket prices exceeded those on the men’s side.

The WNBA also has a stake in this. If Clark is driving viewership, it would help the league for its next star to make it further into the tournament, picking up more fans along the way, which could be a huge factor for their own upcoming media-rights negotiations. 

Should things work out, it could be for the best for everyone: A series of increasingly dramatic wins could draw unprecedented attention to Clark and make her star all the brighter. But by creating the very real possibility of an early Iowa exit, the NCAA may have unintentionally set up a worst-case scenario for others, as well as itself.