THE NCAAAustralia’s financial reliance on its Division I men’s basketball tournament has long fueled gender inequality in college sports, investigators said in a report released Tuesday, when they put challenging the association to review its approach to two of the most famous events in American athletics.
“The NCAA’s broadcast agreements, corporate sponsorship deals, revenue distribution, organizational structure and culture all prioritize Division I men’s basketball over everything else in a way that create, normalize and perpetuate gender inequalities,” says the report, which exceeds 100 pages. “At the same time, the NCAA does not have structures or systems in place to identify, prevent or address these inequities. »
The study, prepared by civil rights attorney Roberta A. Kaplan and her law firm, also suggests that the NCAA earned far less than it should for television rights to the women’s basketball tournament. An analysis, carried out as part of the review, predicted that the contract to broadcast the women’s basketball tournament would be worth at least $85 million per year in 2025. Under the terms of a contract that was put on the market last seen 20 years ago and which has not been “materially renegotiated” since its renewal a decade ago, the NCAA currently values television rights to the women’s tournament at less than $6 million per year.
Tuesday’s report was a detailed, detailed and widely anticipated review of the NCAA, which has spent years touting its commitment to women’s athletics. But the report details one by one, and, most crucially for the association’s future, how the contracts that make the NCAA a financial force have contributed to a pattern of inequities.
“I don’t think you can sweep this under the rug,” Tara VanDerveer, who coached Stanford’s women’s team to a national championship this year, said in an interview Tuesday.
“I don’t think we can say that this is an isolated case,” she added, praising the scope of the report. “I think we’ve reached sort of a tipping point.”
The association’s board of directors, which received a briefing on the investigation Tuesday afternoon, said in a statement that the report “provides useful advice for improving our championships” and that it asked the president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, “to act with urgency to address any concerns.” organizational problems. »
The NCAA, which has already faced years of calls for changes in women’s basketball, ordered the investigation in March, when he faced an outcry disparities between this year’s men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. Players from the men’s tournament, the 67-game competition that is the financial lifeblood of the NCAA thanks to a television contract worth more than $850 million this year, arrived in Indiana to find fully stocked facilities and all the marketing power of the March Madness brand.
But in Texas, where the association hosted this year’s women’s tournament, players initially had sparsely stocked training areas and competition venues, so disappointing that a top coach suggested they looked like high school match sites.
The resulting furor led to pointed accusations against the NCAA – that it allegedly favored the men’s tournament so heavily that it helped deprive women’s soccer of a prominent role in the discourse national – which has sometimes overshadowed one of the most glorious periods of each year. for college athletics.
The association’s decision to hire Kaplan came only after Emmert downplayed concerns expressed by players and coaches in interviews and on social media. The complaints quickly became a crisis for the association, and Emmert, who received a contract extension while the review was underway, pledged at the time that the NCAA would “aggressively address important and significant differences” between basketball competitions. Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in almost all educational institutions, does not apply to the NCAA.
Although it notes “a deep distrust of the NCAA’s willingness and ability” to make crucial changes, the Kaplan report offers more than two dozen recommendations, including holding the men’s and women’s Final Fours in the same town ; reworking the NCAA organizational chart for basketball oversight; and essentially restart the tournament budgeting process.
The association recognized in March that it had budgeted nearly double for its men’s basketball tournament in 2019 compared to what it had planned for its women’s competition. NCAA executives insisted the $13.5 million discrepancy could be attributed to substantial variations in tournament formats and popularity.
In reality, according to the report, the NCAA had a spending deficit of about $35 million. The report acknowledges that “gender equity does not require equal budgets,” but it says the perception that men’s basketball is “highly profitable and therefore worthy of increased investment has cultivated a culture within the NCAA in which men’s basketball is not required to conform to the rules. many of the same budget constraints as women’s basketball.
For the 2021 tournaments, which moved away from their traditional formats due to the coronavirus pandemic, investigators found that NCAA executives believed the men’s tournament was a priority for the organization’s survival after that -it had to cancel the competitions in 2020 and plunged into a financial emergency. The “fundamental difference in perspective on the relative importance of the 2021 men’s and women’s championships led to gender disparities from the start of the planning process,” the investigators wrote.
Organizers of the men’s tournament, for example, were allowed to announce their intention to continue the competition on November 16, 2020, investigators said. But officials were reluctant to allow organizers of the women’s tournament to make an announcement at the same time because they would first have to examine the financial costs of holding the competition.
The men’s tournament, according to the report, received no such scrutiny.
Once the men arrived in Indiana and the women arrived in Texas for their tournaments, investigators said, they had very different experiences. The quality of the food varied widely, as did the player lounges and goody bags provided to attendees. (The NCAA spent $125.55 per player in the first and second rounds of the men’s tournament on gifts; the association spent $60.42 per player in the first rounds of the women’s tournament.)
And investigators found that tournament organizers were devoting far more resources to promoting the 2021 men’s tournament.
But the problems that followed the women’s tournament often lasted for years, Kaplan’s team found. The NCAA’s revenue distribution system, for example, relies heavily on performance in the men’s tournament, but it does not take into account performance in the women’s championship, thus providing less incentive for universities to invest in their women’s basketball programs.
And the NCAA makes money from a corporate sponsorship deal that generates substantial revenue for Division I men’s basketball. The system, investigators wrote, requires that a potential sponsor agree to support all NCAA championship events, closing opportunities to companies with smaller marketing budgets. .
“There is no room for sponsors who might be interested in sponsoring women’s basketball but are unwilling or unable to afford to purchase the advertising time necessary to support men’s basketball,” the report said. The media rights structure, they added, “contributes to the narrative that women’s basketball is supposed to lose money and that men’s basketball must be prioritized in order to maximize revenue for the benefit of all sports of the NCAA.
According to the report, the existing television deal for the women’s tournament also poses a significant obstacle for women’s basketball. In an 88-page addendum to the report, a sports media company estimates that the women’s tournament alone could bring in more than $100 million a year starting in 2025, when the current deal expires.
The NCAA said in March that a third-party consulting firm it hired had allocated 15.9 percent of the existing contract value to the women’s basketball tournament. That deal, which also covers numerous other NCAA championships, is worth $500 million over 14 years.
In the meantime, the company said, the NCAA and its media partners like CBS, Turner and ESPN could take steps that would “protect the premium value” of the men’s tournament while contributing to the “continued development” of the women’s competition. Those options, according to the report, include using the “March Madness” brand for both tournaments.
“We’ve been in an infertile field,” VanDerveer said. “The men’s tournament has been plowed and fertilized, and we’ve thrown the seeds out there and seen what grows. With vision, university support and great leadership, the women’s tournament can be much better. I have a lot of hope.
