Within the weeks earlier than the NCAA Girls’s Basketball Event, the large focus was on enhancing the expertise for gamers, together with increasing the “March Madness” branding to the occasion for the primary time.
Broadcast rights and the thousands and thousands of {dollars} connected to them will quickly change into extra of a precedence.
The NCAA championships bundle — which incorporates the ladies’s event and 28 different title occasions, although not the boys’s tourney — expires in August 2024. Which means the bidding course of for no matter packages the NCAA decides to market would possible start subsequent fall.
ESPN presently pays $34 million per 12 months for that bundle of 29 occasions, which it agreed to in 2011. The Kaplan Report, which was commissioned by the NCAA after glaring inequities between the 2021 men’s and women’s tournaments were brought to light, estimated that the women’s tournament could have a market value of $96 million to $101 million per year as a separate bundle.
Will the NCAA attempt to promote the occasion as its personal product? It’s a query on the minds of many within the ladies’s recreation, together with South Carolina coach Dawn Staley who wants to see tournament teams cash in just like the men.
NCAA President Mark Emmert stated final week earlier than the Last 4 that each one choices are on the desk.
“We’re heading into just the right period to be looking at and determine the best approach going forward for a new contract,” he stated. “Whether that’s splitting up sports, whether that’s keeping some of it together, we’ll have to determine that, and we’ll have to work with outside experts, as we always do, who provide the necessary data and expertise in all of that.”
South Carolina’s 64-49 victory over Connecticut on Sunday night averaged 4.85 million viewers on ESPN, making it the most-watched ladies’s championship recreation since 2004. It was additionally the fourth-largest viewers for the title recreation for the reason that community started airing the whole event in 1996.
The event total averaged 634,000 viewers per recreation, a 16% improve over final 12 months, with lots of the rounds seeing their highest averages in additional than 10 years. This was the second 12 months that each one video games aired on a minimum of one channel nationally as an alternative of going to regional audiences.
It was additionally the second 12 months that ABC aired 4 video games the primary weekend of the event whereas ESPN launched an alternate feed for the Last 4 weekend on ESPN2 with Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi offering commentary. The championship recreation aired at 8 p.m. Jap; in earlier years, tipoff was at 6 p.m. so the sport would precede “Sunday Night Baseball”. That wasn’t the case this 12 months after the basetball season was delayed because of the lockout.
The subsequent step could possibly be for the title recreation to air on ABC, which, like ESPN, is owned by Disney. Rebecca Lobo, a former UConn star and longtime analyst on ESPN, stated it’s extra of a query of when quite than if.
“It’s moving in the right direction. As a women’s basketball fan, that’s my hope, because I know it rates higher, draws a bigger audience and it’s a bigger platform,” she said. “Ideally, to me, that’s where our biggest game would be.”
Promoting stock offered out a month earlier than the event began and included 14 sponsors and 22 advertisers. Disney Promoting’s Deidra Maddock, the vice chairman of sports activities model options, additionally identified that just about two million brackets have been stuffed out on the ESPN Girls’s Event Problem web page.
Having the primary two weekends go Friday by means of Monday, as an alternative of Saturday by means of Tuesday as had been the case in earlier years additionally helped with elevated attendance and rankings. Whereas Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma was not pleased about enjoying a regional closing on a Monday earlier than enjoying within the Last 4 4 nights later, it may have been worse if the final two regional finals have been on a Tuesday.
UCLA coach and Girls’s Basketball Coaches Affiliation President Cori Shut stated a chance can be to have the primary two weekends go Thursday by means of Sunday, identical to the boys’s event. Whereas the Kaplan Report recommended enjoying on days the boys’s event is off, a Sunday by means of Wednesday mannequin can be a detriment to gamers in addition to attendance and rankings.
One other thought from the report that is not getting a lot traction is having one or two networks have each the boys’s and ladies’s event. The CBS/Turner cope with the boys’s event runs till 2036 and the concept of two networks having to presumably program 32 video games in sooner or later — 16 every for males’s and ladies’s within the first spherical — would not make it possible.
CBS and Turner’s authentic contract with the NCAA was for 14 years at $10.8 billion (common $770 million per 12 months). They signed an extension in 2016 and the per 12 months common will bounce to $1.1 billion starting in 2025.
Tag Garson, Wasserman’s senior vice chairman of properties, stated the most important key to any upcoming rights deal is ensuring there’s flexibility in adapting to a altering media panorama.
“A few years ago, there wasn’t a Paramount Plus, Disney Plus or Peacock. There is something to be said for having stability, in an age within collegiate athletics or intercollegiate athletics that there hasn’t been as much stability recently,” Garson said. “But at the same time, if anybody can tell you where media is headed in the next decade, I have a bridge to sell you.”
That uncertainy is definitely an element for the NCAA, which is below scrutiny on the subject of enhancing gender fairness even because it overhauls its very approach to governing more than 1,200 member schools with nearly 500,000 athletes.
“That’s our big quest. How do we find the best intersection between attendance, TV ratings, corporate sponsorship, student-athlete welfare and competitive equity, and where do all those circles of priorities converge?” Close asked. “There are times where things need to be exactly equal. But there are other times where we just want a chance to be successful in our own landscape.”
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More AP women’s college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/womens-college-basketball and https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-womens-college-basketball-poll and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25
