How much could each sport’s NCAA tournament command on the open market?
A gender equity report was published Tuesday following an external review of the NCAA’s approach to men’s and women’s sports. The results were not surprising and not pretty.
The report highlighted a myriad of structural issues within the NCAA, including that many systems exist solely for the purpose of maximizing the “value of and support to the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship as the primary source of funding for the NCAA and its membership.”
The men’s basketball tournament has long been the NCAA’s largest revenue source — the NCAA does not run the College Football Playoff — and it’s expected to be worth about $1.1 billion by 2025.
The women’s tournament, meanwhile, is included in a package of 29 NCAA championships that ESPN pays $34 million for annually. That deal ends in 2025.
According to an independent analysis in the report by expert Ed Desser, the women’s basketball tournament should be worth between $81 million and $112 million annually by 2025.
Clearly, the NCAA stands to make quite a bit of money by selling the broadcast rights to the women’s basketball tournament separately on the open market.
That got me wondering if there are any other NCAA tournaments that would also be worth taking to the open market.
Quick (oversimplified) valuations for other NCAA tournaments
CBS and Turner paid $850 million for this year’s men’s basketball tournament. The tournament has 67 games, so that equates to $12,686,567.16 million per game.
The average viewership for the tournament’s 67 games was 8,037,910.45 people per game. So, CBS and Turner paid $1.58 per viewer per game.
I took that $1.58 per viewer per game number and applied it to every other NCAA Tournament with available 2020–21 viewership data to see what those tournaments could have been worth.
Here’s how those number turned out:
Women’s Basketball — $59.2 million
Softball — $30.4 million (WCWS only)
Baseball — $19 million (MCWS only)
Women’s Volleyball — $18.9 million
Hockey — $4.6 million
Gymnastics — $1.8 million (semifinals & finals only)
Wrestling — $1.6 million (semifinals & finals only)
Men’s Lacrosse — $1.5 million (semifinals & finals only)
These numbers are inexact because they’re based off only one year of data. But that anecdotal data makes it pretty clear that women’s basketball, softball, baseball and women’s volleyball would command significant money if those rights were each sold on the open market.
Remember that baseball and softball also have regionals and super regionals that would add some more value to those packages. Those rounds are not included in the valuation because I couldn’t find any data for baseball and could only find super regionals for softball. (If you add in the super regionals for softball, the valuation jumps from $30.4 million to $47.7 million.)
The numbers for those two sports could also potentially be higher on a network other than ESPN. A lot of this year’s games ended up in not-so-prime time slots because of ESPN’s existing deals with the NBA, MLB and others. If CBS or NBC or FOX were showcasing those tournaments in prime windows, the viewership numbers would likely grow.
The NCAA ice hockey tournament, which drew an average of 193,000 viewers across the 15-game tournament, lags behind baseball and softball but would also probably be worth more on its own than as part of a ESPN bundle.
For the sports at the bottom of the list, it’s harder to tell if it would make sense to sell those rights separately.
Gymnastics and wrestling would each be worth fewer than $2 million per year (the added value from the rounds before the semis and finals would probably be negligible), so they would probably work better in a bundle.
But, perhaps NBC/Peacock would want to pay for just those two sports, plus swimming, because they’ve already built up an audience for those sports thanks to decades of Olympics coverage. That could be an example of a smaller package the NCAA could put together to get the most revenue out of all of its sports
What’s plain to see is that the NCAA is selling its products short by putting all of it’s resources into the men’s basketball tournament. While that tournament is far and away the biggest moneymaker, other sports shouldn’t automatically be viewed as “money-losers.” There are several other tournaments that could bring in serious revenue if more resources were devoted to them.
