By Sabreena Merchant, Ben Pickman and Chantel Jennings
The Division I Board of Directors on Tuesday introduced a highly anticipated proposal to include financial units for the women’s NCAA basketball tournament, a practice already existing on the men’s side. The fund, if passed in a final vote in January involving the full Division I membership, would begin during the 2025 women’s NCAA Tournament with payouts starting during the 2025-26 fiscal year.
Conferences are awarded units — a fixed amount of revenue — for each game that their teams play in the tournament. The conference then splits the payout among its member schools and has the authority to divide the amount at its discretion. For a mid-major conference, units can dramatically increase total revenue.
Assuming the vote goes through, units will be dispersed from the aforementioned fund. The fund will begin at $15 million in 2025-26 before increasing to $20 million in 2026-27 and $25 million in 2027-28. After that, the funds would grow at the same rate as all other Division I revenue distribution funds (around 2.9 percent).
The proposal comes in the wake of the media rights deal the NCAA signed with ESPN in January 2024.
The eight-year, $920 million deal included the domestic rights to 40 championships, including women’s basketball. At the time, NCAA president Charlie Baker said that the organization valued the women’s tournament at $65 million a year within their calculations.
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While many had been frustrated to see the women’s championship bundled with 39 other championships instead of being broken out and put to market on its own, as was suggested by the 2021 Kaplan Report (which had put an $81 to $112 million valuation on the event), the move toward units is a significant and important step forward for women’s college basketball.
“I think in order for us to grow, in women’s basketball, I think we need to all get units for the NCAA Tournament, to reap some benefits and revenue share from that,” one Division I head coach who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the topic publicly told The Athletic this winter.
On the men’s side, units have long been both a reward for college conferences whose teams perform well and a motivator for programs to invest in their men’s basketball programs. This past year, each unit was valued at $2 million apiece, paid out to each program’s respective conference over six years.
For example, the SEC this year received $34 million from the men’s basketball units despite the conference having only one Final Four team. But the conference, which saw South Carolina win its second women’s national championship in three years, received no payout for the dominant success of the Gamecocks.
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(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
