Women’s March Madness Enters Year 1 of Polarizing Rights Deal

The 2025 Women’s March Madness tournament is a historic one: It’s the first under the eight-year, $920 million contract extension between ESPN and the NCAA.

The deal, which was signed in January 2024, was for 40 NCAA championships. The women’s basketball tournament was its centerpiece, valued at $65 million per year, nearly twice as much as the $34 million average payout received in its previous deal. 

The extension followed a 2023 tournament that averaged 983,000 viewers on ESPN networks, up 55% from the previous year, including a championship game between Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes and Angel Reese’s LSU Tigers that drew nearly 10 million viewers. 

While the deal was a sign of the women’s tournament growth, it still received criticism. There was a belief that women’s March Madness was still undervalued and that it should earn a separate deal from other NCAA championships, similar to the men’s. A gender equity report commissioned by the NCAA in 2021 estimated the women’s tournament could be worth $81 million to $112 million per year on its own.

That criticism only grew after the 2024 tournament, which took place just months after the media-rights extension was signed and surpassed perhaps even the most optimistic women’s basketball supporters’ expectations. 

Women’s March Madness Full Tournament Viewership Average

• 2024: 2.2 million (+121%)
• 2023: 983,000
• 2022: 634,000
• 2021: 546,000 

The 2024 women’s tournament final famously outpaced the men’s championship game, drawing 18.9 million viewers on ABC.

The men’s March Madness tournament will also have its eight-year media-rights extension with CBS and TNT kick in this year—a deal agreed upon way back in 2016—worth an average of $1.1 billion per year, nearly 17 times as much as the women’s annual deal.

However, there were a few reasons for the relatively low price of the women’s deal. When negotiations started in 2022, spending was somewhat constrained, as seen by ESPN’s decision to pass on the Big Ten. The Pac-12 overestimated its value that year and lost most of its schools.

NCAA president Charlie Baker also told Front Office Sports that it was important to leverage the women’s tournament as a way to lift the championships of other sports. “I wanted the best deal for everybody,” Baker said after the deal was announced.

But a key point in the deal was the timing of the end of it: 2032, the same year as the men’s championship. This would allow the NCAA to negotiate the deals simultaneously and potentially amend any inequities between the two tournaments.