SBJ Unpacks: Progress, if not equity, for NCAA women’s basketball

Tonight in Unpacks: This year’s Women’s Final Four was in stark contrast to the scene in 2021 during the March Madness bubble, when a TikTok of a singular weight rack in the gym showed the inequities between the men’s and women’s tournaments. While the situation is improving, SBJ’s Rachel Axon reports true equity remains elusive in this early look at next week’s magazine.

Also tonight:

• Indian Premier League season stokes fandom, U.S. investment
• Joe Buck hopes to be at ESPN for ‘rest of my career’
• Padres reach ballpark retail sales record thanks to City Connect 2.0
• Taking stock of the NFL’s offseason business

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Austin Karp wraps up the week with Prime Video’s Masters debut, the antitrust investigation into the NFL, a twist in the release of MLB’s City Connect uniforms and more.

Before the women’s basketball players took the court in Phoenix at the Final Four, they took a private tour of Tourney Town. The women rode buses through a city taken over by their event, with everything from a multi-story bracket on the side of a building to sponsor activations that provided entertainment for fans between games.

This year’s Final Four represented a far cry from the one that took place in 2021’s COVID bubble. But looking back five years, Sedona Prince’s viral video of inequities at that event — her TikTok of a singular weight rack in the women’s gym compared to the loaded men’s setup — and the subsequent NCAA-commissioned inquiry made their experience better this month.

Since 2021, the NCAA has increased investment and followed recommendations to build the tournament experience. Unquestionably, it has made significant progress there, if not equality, as the NCAA still looks to better commercialize the booming interest in women’s basketball.

“In terms of the growth of the game, I couldn’t be prouder. I was in the bubble when it got exposed, some of the differences,” said UCLA coach Cori Close, days before winning the school’s first NCAA title in women’s basketball.

“Everything that’s in our locker room today when we walked in the arena or when we got to the hotel is the same as what the men were. I don’t take that for granted. That was a costly change. That was an intentional change.”

The report had served as a wake-up call, highlighting several systemic inequities and the ways the NCAA had subjugated the women’s tournament. Conducted by Kaplan, Hecker & Fink LLP, and known as the Kaplan report, it detailed in more than 100 pages how the NCAA’s structure and culture prioritized the men’s tournament over the women’s, and how the NCAA’s treatment of the women’s event was inferior in virtually every measurable way.

“With respect to women’s basketball, the NCAA has not lived up to its stated commitment to ‘diversity, inclusion and gender equity among its student-athletes, coaches and administrators,’” the report said.

Since then, the NCAA has made changes to create equity within the tournament even as larger structural ones relying on contractual relationships have yet to shift. Among the improvements:

• Using the term March Madness for the women’s tournament after years of only using the trademarked moniker for the men’s.
• Expanding the women’s tournament field from 64 to 68 to match the men’s and creating the Women’s Basketball Invitational Tournament.
• Increasing the annual budget for the tournament by $14 million.
• Adopting revenue distribution through units earned in the tournament with funds from its $115 million annual deal with ESPN signed in 2024.

In assessing and implementing many of the more than two dozen recommendations in the report, the NCAA has worked to give athletes an equitable experience.

“I do feel strongly that the gender equity report, what it did again, because it puts so many of those items more out in the public sphere, that it sped up a lot of those items that were noted in order for them to get implemented and instituted in a faster timeline,” said Lynn Holzman, the NCAA’s vice president for women’s basketball.

Added University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Athletic Director Amanda Braun, who serves as chair of the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee, “It seems like where our efforts are meeting that momentum, there may be other things we can do that we’ll learn as we go, opportunities that will present themselves that we’re not aware of. But it does feel like during my time, I’ve watched Lynn and her staff just sort of build it while they fly it.”

Five years later, and they’re still building.

Still-missed sponsorship opportunities

For all its progress, the NCAA has yet to be able to fully shift the commercial components contributing to the inequity found in the Kaplan report.

Most notably, its agreements with CBS/Turner have served to prioritize the men’s tournament. While it broadcasts just the men’s tournament, CBS/Turner sells the corporate sponsorships that support all of the NCAA’s championships and is incentivized to prioritize the event it has the rights to above all others.

The agreement is “shutting out sponsors who might otherwise be interested in supporting women’s basketball but cannot afford the more costly sponsorship of men’s basketball,” the report found.

To address this, it recommended the NCAA negotiate with CBS/Turner to create a new tier of corporate sponsorship and open up nonconflicting categories for brands that want to support the women’s tournament.

That hasn’t happened yet, and CBS/Turner’s current NCAA deal goes through 2032.

“I would really like to see us be able to come up with something other than the status quo on that, and I made that pretty clear to our media partners pretty much since I got the job,” said NCAA President Charlie Baker, who was named to the role in late 2022.

“It’s part of discussions that we’re having.”

TNT Sports, which works on the corporate sponsorship program alongside CBS, declined to comment.

If that failure to adjust seemed significant five years ago, it’s even more so now as interest and investment in women’s sports has exploded since.

Deloitte this week projected global revenue from women’s pro sports to exceed $3 billion in 2026, with nearly half of that coming from sponsorships. On the collegiate level, these past five years have seen significant changes to laws and rules around athletes’ use of their name, image and likeness.

Female athletes, in particular, have excelled in drawing in brands. Take the champion Bruins, whose athletes have deals with several national brands, including Nyx, Sprouts, Gorjana, Olipop, Great Clips, Command, Opill, Jordan Brand and Clif Bar.

“The NCAA and your typical multimedia partner, they’re not looking in the social space, but [that’s] where our student athletes, specifically our female student athletes, thrive because they have this ability to build content that’s authentic,” said Erin Adkins, executive senior associate AD/NIL strategy and initiatives at UCLA. “These brands want to work with them. Beauty brands, local businesses, even some of the national are like, ‘We’re going to put more of our marketing dollars into social than we are print, ad, or digital because social moves our needle and it’s organic, authentic content.’”

As part of the recommendations in the Kaplan report, the NCAA is tracking sponsor activations around both events.

This year’s Tourney Town in Phoenix had seven sponsors activate there, largely with some version of shooting a basketball. To the extent any were branded around a specific personality, they featured two male spokesmen — Charles Barkley for Capital One and Shaquille O’Neal for Home Depot.

While AT&T’s space wasn’t branded with any specific athlete, it included UCLA guard Kiki Rice appearing on an LED wall to coach fans on where to shoot.

It’s part of increased investment in the women’s tournament, with AT&T also sponsoring the Saturday night concert with Kehlani.

“We’ve actually seen a lot more growth financially in our activation dollars towards the women,” said Mario Artesiano, director of sponsorships at AT&T. “We still have a larger activation footprint (in Indianapolis at the men’s Final Four), but we’ve grown with the NCAA our Super Saturday Night. That never really existed before.

“Over the last three years we’ve seen a significant level of investment in the talent and the artists. We want to make the women’s tournament just like the men’s tournament, an event to go to and it is.”

More room to grow broadcast deal

For all the visible treatment and staging of the tournament that has improved, especially in its later stages hosted at neutral sites, one of the biggest changes to come out of the report represents a mixed bag.

The NCAA has not maximized the broadcast rights for the women’s tournament in packaging them with the championships for 29 other sports. If sold on its own, women’s basketball could expect $81 million to $112 million per year, media expert Ed Desser said in the report.

In extending its deal with ESPN in 2024, the NCAA kept the championships packaged together. Women’s basketball accounts for around $65 million (10 times what it had been valued) of the $115 million deal, with the extension taking the deal through 2032 when the men’s rights with CBS/Turner are also up.

“It was probably a sensible play at the time. It’s not forever. You can always go back and decide something different,” said Chris Plonsky, executive senior associate AD at Texas. “They kept their powder dry and again, the product is going to get better.”

Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman pointed to changes to broadcast platforms offering another key variable that will influence the NCAA’s decision making in the coming years.

“They were literally used as leverage to get carriage for the other sports. Might that change in a few years? Possibly,” Ackerman said. “It’s a possibility so that the women’s tournament can be sort of freed up and maybe its true value tested.”

As is, even the current deal has led to progress those in the sport have long called for — the distribution of revenue through units earned for success in the tournament. The NCAA voted last year to make payments over three years, with the pool growing from $15 million last year to $25 million in distribution for next year’s tournament.

“We are encouraged that there is a unit distribution for the tournament. It will grow over time, but we have one now,” said Danielle Donehew, executive director of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association that had supported the Kaplan report recommendation to sell the rights separately.

“After looking at the deal that was accepted, it is more expansive than we had before. … [It’s] around $65 million per year, which is a solid number and it’s a number we can continue to grow from.”

Several pointed to the value in staying with ESPN, which has broadcast the tournament since 1996. Under the deal, the company agreed to air the national championship on ABC.

It has seen a ratings boom in recent years. Most notably, the 2024 tournament shattered records with Iowa’s Caitlin Clark generating a following. That year, 18.9 million watched the national championship with South Carolina beating the Hawkeyes. This year’s championship averaged 9.9 million viewers, ranking third all time behind the 2023 and 2024 games.

“It is going to be hard to touch some of the ceilings that we had ratings-wise in recent years,” said ESPN play-by-play announcer Ryan Ruocco. “But when you see how much the floor has been raised over the last couple of years, it’s crazy.”

That growth in interest has come as the Kaplan report pushed the NCAA to modernize and commercially maximize its second biggest event. While that’s still in progress, it’s a far cry from the single weight rack in Prince’s video that brought the inequities to light.

“Everything from viewership, corporate sponsorship, all those things throughout the year,” Close said, “I’m just excited, and we’ve got to keep our foot on the gas.”

Much of India’s attention is currently occupied by the 19^th season of the Indian Premier League, a property unlike any other, given its apparent stranglehold on an entire nation at this time of year. And, more than ever, so is a little bit of corporate America’s.

On the eve of this year’s tournament — a cricketing juggernaut that provides big hitting, vibrant colors, rabid fans, pacy packaging and more engaged Indian eyeballs than anything else — two of the 10 franchises were acquired by groups that included U.S. investors.

Royal Challengers Bengaluru, current men’s and women’s champions, were sold by Diageo in March to a consortium made up of Indian conglomerate Aditya Birla Group, Times of India Group, Blackstone and David Blitzer’s Bolt Ventures, for $1.78 billion. Further north, the Rajasthan Royals went for $1.635 billion, bought by a group led by Arizona-based Kal Somani.

It’s the latest reminder of the tear the IPL has been on since its inaugural season in 2008. Its latest media rights round in 2022 put it behind only the NFL on a cost-per-game basis, and its success has been built on many of the same attributes: genuine scarcity (just 74 matches per season), insatiable media appetite and prize asset status for ownership.

U.S. interest for cricket, domestically and abroad, has been on the rise, albeit from a low base, for a while. Major League Cricket has attracted interest, and last summer’s auction for slices of teams competing in The Hundred, England’s attempt at a short-form cricket format, garnered investments from Todd Boehly, Tom Wagner, Egon Durban and the CEOs of Microsoft and Google.

But India and the IPL is the big one — a market of 1.47 billion people for whom nothing moves the needle like cricket. In that respect, it’s no surprise that a serial sports investor such as Blitzer sees a stake in RCB as a smart addition to his portfolio.

The due diligence on a deal to buy the only team that matters in India’s third-largest city — population 14.7 million — might have gone something like this.

You’re buying one of the IPL’s powerhouse franchises, one of its most popular brands, with a flourishing women’s team and a men’s side that, at last, has the silverware to match its ambition, operating in a tournament that runs for two months a year.

You’re getting exposed to high politics. It would be unwise to claim to be an expert on India’s political scene after just a couple of brief visits, but it’s clear that, in India, cricket is politics. For outside investors, understanding how to navigate the particularities of the way things work in such a vast country, and even within cricket, in which the all-powerful Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) calls the shots and controls the structure, is paramount — not least because it’s the state cricket associations that own the stadiums in which games are played. Acquiring an IPL team is not, at least for now, a real estate play.

Indeed, operations and safety in and around stadiums in the country continue to be a problem. A day after RCB claimed the men’s IPL last June — the team’s first title in 18 seasons — a stampede during the victory celebrations outside the 32,000-capacity M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru resulted in the death of 11 fans. That incident helped accelerate Diageo’s decision to sell the team, and RCB has been allowed to play at the venue this season only after meeting new state-mandated safety criteria.

You might be buying peak IPL. Some, not least Lalit Modi, who founded the whole thing back in 2007, would strongly disagree, but there is an argument that the peak has already been reached.

The BCCI is approaching its next round of domestic media rights sales. This has been the fuel that ignited the tournament since Modi struck the first deal, before a ball had been bowled, in 2008. The most recent agreement, for seasons 2023 to 2027, is worth $3.02 billion for TV and $3.05 billion for streaming, but murmurs suggest a plateauing, rather than further growth, is the likeliest outcome in the next cycle, even as the BCCI attempts to entice a new player — a YouTube, a Netflix — to the tournament.

Last year’s legislation outlawing online gaming platforms that take money in India may also, over time, affect the relationship between viewers and the IPL; one of the league’s biggest backers, fantasy gaming giant Dream11, widely considered a driver of the IPL’s recent popularity, has been forced to overhaul its business model, with a greater focus on markets outside India.

And yet, for now, the IPL juggernaut rumbles on unabated. In Bengaluru, RCB are the only story in town. Traveling there a couple of times over the past few years, it’s been impossible, even out of season, to drive from the airport into town, or switch on a TV, without being bombarded by RCB and its players promoting something. Virat Kohli, national demigod and international superstar, is more often than not front and center. If the IPL tapped into anything, it’s loyalty and devotion among fans rarely, if ever, seen anywhere else.

And that’s ultimately what David Blitzer and his partners are buying.

David Cushnan is content director at Leaders in Sport in London. Alongside James Emmett, he writes the weekly Worth Knowing newsletter on the global business of sport.

Joe Buck’s current ESPN contract concludes at the end of this coming NFL season, but he’s very clear on where he wants to ply his trade for the rest of his career.

“If you reached through my computer screen right now and handed me a contract to continue my time at ESPN, I would sign it without even looking at it,” Buck said. “I’ve loved every second of it and I am hopeful that I’m at ESPN for the rest of my career. That’s as plain as I can say it and as honest as I can say it and maybe it’s stupid of me to say. If something gets thrown at me and I have to shift, I’ll shift. But I would be hopeful to stay right where I am until I’m finished.”

Buck said there have been no formal talks -- he is represented by CAA’s Tom Young -- but the broadcaster, who signed a five-year deal with ESPN in 2022, said he believes both sides are happy and no one has “given anybody any pause in continuing our relationship.” He spoke on this, among many subjects, as part of a 40-minute conversation that will be published Saturday on the “Sports Media with Richard Deitsch” podcast.

It’s obviously a big year for Buck and “Monday Night Football” partner Troy Aikman -- and the whole ESPN NFL group, really -- as ESPN declared in February that this year would be “The Year of the Super Bowl,” a 12-month, multi-platform celebration leading toward ESPN’s first-ever Super Bowl production in February 2027. Buck, Aikman, Laura Rutledge and Lisa Salters will be on that call.

“This is a big thing for ESPN and ABC, and I don’t think that’s something that we should scoff at,” Buck said. ”I think it’s something that should be celebrated. I love being at a place that holds this thing up. Like this is our chance. That’s a great feeling as an announcer. … The buildup, I love. I don’t think it adds any pressure. It doesn’t add any pressure to me. It just means that the people that I work for are excited about it and that’s good.

“I did six of them and Fox had them multiple times. I don’t want to say it’s old hat, but bringing it to someplace that hasn’t had it and being a part of that was always kind of a carrot on the stick switching over. It was like you still get a Super Bowl. Well, now it’s here and I love that.”

Next week, Buck, who called 22 consecutive World Series for Fox and 24 in total for Fox, will return to calling baseball on Wednesday for a one-off broadcast of Dodgers-Mets in L.A. He will be joined in the booth by analysts Ron Darling and Orel Hershiser and reporter Buster Olney as part of ESPN’s exclusive, national presentation that will emanate from Dodger Stadium and celebrate Jackie Robinson Day.

Buck said ESPN SVP/Sports Production Mark Gross asked him which analysts he’d love to work with, and he mentioned Darling and Hershsier. ESPN then went about securing them for the game. Darling works regularly for SNY calling the Mets, while Hershiser calls Dodgers games for SportsNet LA.

“I have had so much fun working at ESPN,” Buck said. “For the people I work for -- and with the people I get to do games with.”

The Padres had a record-setting Thursday at Petco Park, surpassing $1.1M in ballpark retail sales following the launch of their City Connect 2.0 uniforms and related merchandise, a team official told SBJ. That figure doubled San Diego’s previous single-day record of $550,000, set on Opening Day in 2023, the year the team had LF Juan Soto. The 41,390 fans who attended the game were also treated to a walk-off win. The Padres are seeking their fourth straight year surpassing the 3 million fan mark. San Diego’s City Connect 2.0s celebrate “the Padres’ bi-national region and culture through honoring its traditions and families with a focus on Día de los Muertos, the design features a sunset-ombre “San Diego” chest wordmark, La Catrina sleeve patch, marigold-patterned trim, bone colored hat and pants, and papel picado jock tag.” The Padres will wear them on the field for the first time Friday.

So much for the NFL offseason. At a time when most NFL and team employees are starting to envision life after the draft and maybe some PTO, the league is putting together a lengthy and significant offseason to-do list. Here’s a rundown of the most obvious big-ticket loose ends, which doesn’t even include the biggest thing — the long-term media rights packages — just because that doesn’t have to happen this offseason.

Players contract/18th game: Can the NFL secure an 18th regular-season game from the NFLPA this offseason? If you take the world at face value, it would seem difficult. JC Tretter is just nine days into his tenure as executive director of the NFLPA; NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said nice things about letting him get acclimated. And Tretter says the union wouldn’t negotiate now anyway.

But clearly, the NFL has not given up on having an 18-game season as soon as 2027, so somebody inside 345 Park thinks it’s possible. Watch for this storyline to develop in May.

Bears stadium: Goodell says this needs to be settled “sooner rather than later.” Bears President Kevin Warren says he expects to get a stadium deal done, in either Illinois or Indiana, by “late spring/early summer.” That’s an intentionally flexible timeline, but know this: The Illinois Legislature is supposed to adjourn May 31; it can sit longer, but all bills passed after that need 60% support, not just a bare majority.

If that date passes without the property tax and infrastructure spending legislation the Bears say they need in Illinois, well, summer starts June 21, and Indiana is locked and loaded. If the Bears are truly prepared to move to Indiana, then at that point the decision appears made.

Incidentally, Warren made clear that the “due diligence” on the stadium site in Hammond, Indiana, is not the kind of due diligence that could still uncover a critical flaw. “I don’t foresee any reason that we’re going to find something that’s going to render this project not capable of getting done, but it will give us clarity on kind of the final cost and the process and the timing,” he said.

Mini media rights package: The NFL wants to release a schedule during the network Upfronts the week of May 11. That gives Executive VP/Media Distribution Hans Schroeder and his team about four weeks to sell the rights to the five games that don’t have a distributor, including the 49ers-Rams matchup in Australia. One challenge, sources said, is networks and streamers are bidding without knowing matchups or windows. Yes, the Australia game drives extraordinary value, but there’s no guarantee the others are premier games.

The uncertainty around those five games doesn’t affect the rest of the schedule much, Schroeder said, so it’s not holding back the work. Finding the best combination of creative possibilities for business and fans is the hard part, he said. “The challenge, quite frankly, is managing through some really interesting proposals and creativity for the market.”

Seahawks sale: As I wrote last week, everyone believes the Seahawks sale can get done by the season, but it’s potentially a tough putt because of the Super Bowl appearance, which delayed the auction by weeks. In other words, anyone associated with this deal should have modest vacation expectations this summer.

Referee CBA: The NFLRA’s labor contract expires May 31, which in theory is still plenty of time to strike a deal. But the league’s tactic of going public against the officials starting at the league meeting, including a plan to hire replacement officials in May, suggests trouble ahead.

• The White Sox are tipping their cap to the Pope. And because of overwhelming fan demand, everyone in attendance will now receive the team’s “Pope Hat” giveaway on Aug. 11, reports SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo.
• ESPN is rolling out its plans for a new campaign marketing “Inside the NBA” ahead of the show’s first postseason as part of the network, writes SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• In this week’s Talent Pool agency roundup, SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario reports that Dolphins DB Jack Jones signed with Rosenhaus Sports, with Drew Rosenhaus representing him.
• UFC is starting to dole out sponsorship assets for the Freedom 250 event at the White House this summer, with insurance agency Supersure getting commercial time during the showcase, reports SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• Live Nation’s antitrust trial against 34 states could finish as early as Friday, writes SBJ’s Ethan Joyce. Juror deliberation started Friday morning following the trial’s closing arguments Thursday.
• Perfect Game selected Vivenu as its ticketing and e-commerce platform, centralizing the complex digital ecosystem for the youth diamond sports organizer, notes Joyce.