For the first time since the NCAA began hosting a women’s basketball tournament in 1982, a deep run through the bracket will produce more than bragging rights or a championship banner.
Money is on the line, too.
Every game that a school plays between the First Four through the Final Four — making the championship game doesn’t count — will earn what the NCAA calls a “unit,” essentially one slice of the annual television revenue brought in from the NCAA’s media rights deal to broadcast the tournament. All units earned by a conference’s members during a women’s tournament will be paid by the NCAA to the conference, which then splits up the pool of money and redistributes it back to the schools over the next three years.
At stake this year are 132 units worth a combined $15 million, meaning that if No. 1 overall seed UCLA advances to the championship game, it would earn the Big Ten conference $1.3 million to be paid out through 2028. (Conferences use different methods to decide which schools receive how much.) That pool available for tournament teams will grow to $20 million in 2026, $25 million in 2027 and increase by 2.9% annually after that, the same rate as other Division I funds.
There’s a reason why the NCAA landed on this unit-based system: It is the same one that’s been used to reward men’s teams in the NCAA Tournament since 1991.
Between 1997 and 2018, the combined units earned by men’s teams from the Big Ten Conference alone raked in an estimated $340 million, according to a 2019 analysis by The Associated Press.
During the same span, meanwhile, women’s basketball teams including powerhouses Connecticut, Tennessee and South Carolina earned zilch.
Among the numerous books on sports written by Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College, is 1999’s “Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports,” in which he argued for the NCAA to adopt a unit-based payment system for women’s basketball. Zimbalist told NBC News that when Myles Brand was the NCAA president from 2003 to 2009, he had spoken with Brand about fixing what he called the discriminatory disparity that saw men’s teams, but not their women’s counterparts, paid for their performance.
“It never had any justification,” Zimbalist said.
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Why did it take 34 years to fix? The longtime argument against such a move — that the men’s tournament drew more viewers and was thus more valuable — ignored that the women’s tournament nonetheless also drew millions of viewers as well, and could have drawn even more had it been marketed equally to the men’s, Zimbalist said.
“It never would have made any sense to say that women should get paid zero, because the women in fact were attracting customers and revenue,” he said.
That 34-year gap between the first tournament payouts for men and women was why in January, when an NCAA council approved a fund to start the payments, Danielle Donehew, the executive director of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, called it a “momentous victory” that was “the culmination of decades of hard work.”
That victory arrived, in part, because of pressure. In 2021, women’s basketball players taking part in the NCAA Tournament documented on social media the disparities in how they were treated compared to the men, ranging from paltry weight rooms to meager gift bags. With players agitating for equal treatment and the public asking questions, the NCAA hired a law firm to conduct a gender equity assessment. The findings, released in 2021, were scathing.
“The NCAA’s broadcast agreements, corporate sponsorship contracts, distribution of revenue, organizational structure, and culture all prioritize Division I men’s basketball over everything else in ways that create, normalize, and perpetuate gender inequities,” wrote the firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP.
The NCAA instituted a few changes immediately, such as allowing the women’s tournament to finally use “March Madness” in its marketing, after previously limiting its use solely to the men’s tournament. Four years after the Kaplan report, there were indications last summer that unit-based payouts were coming to women’s basketball. And when they were officially approved in January, the NCAA attempted to reward women according a standard equal to or better than the men, whose units earnings are paid out over a six-year period.
The fund that pays out units in the women’s basketball tournament is capped at $15 million this year because it represents 26% of the NCAA’s annual revenue from the media rights deal it inked with ESPN to broadcast the women’s tournament, the same percentage men’s teams drew in 1991. Men’s teams in the tournament currently take in a slightly lower percentage of annual revenue, about 24%.
Still, the total pool of money available to be earned by men’s teams in the tournament this year is over $200 million more than the women’s pool. Where a unit in the women’s tournament will be valued at around $114,000 this year, a unit in the men’s tournament is worth around $2 million.
The reason? Television.
It wasn’t a coincidence that men’s teams began earning payouts in 1991; that year, CBS began a six-year agreement, valued at $1 billion at the time, to exclusively broadcast the men’s tournament.
Revenue from the rights to broadcast the Division I men’s basketball tournament have skyrocketed since. Last year alone, the NCAA’s deal granting CBS and Turner the rights to broadcast the men’s basketball tournament brought in $950 million — the lion’s share of the NCAA’s $1.3 billion in revenue, according to financial statements. Next year, the deal alone will pay the NCAA more than $1 billion — bringing in more in one year than the NCAA will be paid over the entire life of its current eight-year, $920 million contract with ESPN to air the women’s basketball tournament along with the championships of more than 20 other NCAA sports.
The NCAA could have broken off the women’s basketball tournament into its own media rights deal, but opted to keep it as part of a larger package. The women’s tournament portion of that package is valued at about $65 million annually, NCAA President Charlie Baker told the AP last year.
“Yes, it’s a bundle,” Baker said at the time, “but it’s a bigger bundle and it’s a bigger bundle that will be much better.”
Fueled by the popularity of then-Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark facing dynastic South Carolina, last year’s women’s NCAA championship game drew a record 18.7 million viewers — 4 million more than the men’s title game, making it the most watched basketball game since 2019, including the NBA.
“If you want to go back to this historical argument and say, ‘Oh, we should remunerate based upon the value that they create,’ then women should be getting paid more this year than the men, not 1/15th the value of the men,” Zimbalist said. “To me, it’s highway robbery. It’s the worst example of exploitation of women that you can imagine. So they wait 34 years, and then they finally give them crumbs. And I don’t know what Charlie Baker thinks he’s doing, but I think it’s totally unacceptable.”
Whether the enormous difference in the value of units between the men’s and women’s tournaments can be narrowed won’t be known until 2032, when the media rights deals for both tournaments next come up for bidding. Packaging the women’s basketball tournament in that bundle with other NCAA championships undervalued the women’s tournament, according to the 2021 Kaplan report, whose analysis suggested the rights for the women’s basketball tournament alone could have sold for $81-$112 million in 2025. Yet the NCAA opted to keep women’s basketball as part of that larger bundle when it reupped its deal with ESPN last year.
“The ultimate question would have been in the NCAA’s mind and their consultants’ mind is, ‘OK, if we sell the NCAA women’s tournament with all the other events, we’re going to get X. If we sell the women’s tournament alone and the other championship events, we’re going to get X plus Y. Well, is that number going to be bigger than if we just sold them all together?’” said Bob Thompson, a former television executive at Fox Sports who now runs his own consulting firm, Thompson Sports Group.
“And they could face the possibility that someone would say, ‘I want the women’s tournament, I don’t want anything else,’ and then those events, they’re sort of sitting there off by themselves, and is anybody going to really go after them? And for the NCAA, it’s extremely important that those events see the light of day and are on television, and is on as broad-based television as possible, which is why I think they’re very happy with the ESPN deal and putting the entirety of it on ESPN.”
Experts are watching to see in the future whether the NCAA will spin off the women’s tournament into its own media rights package, combine it with the men’s tournament or keep it in a bundle.
Within women’s basketball, the drastic difference in value between men’s and women’s payouts is noted. But having them at all, starting this year, was described by Duke coach Kara Lawson in January as a “step forward that is really valuable.”
“If your sport proves itself to be a moneymaker in this environment,” Lawson said, “all of the constituents of that sport get rewarded.”
