One year later, the Women’s NCAA Tournament has more teams, more sponsors and ‘March Madness’

The report by law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLC, published last August, stated that the NCAA “Broadcasting, corporate sponsorship, revenue sharing, organizational structure, and culture make all Division I men basketball a priority over everything else.” The results were significant because the NCAA, a nonprofit, is committed to pursuing its stated values ​​such as gender equality in ways that are not professional sports.

A year later, the women’s tournament, which tipped on Wednesday, was improved in several ways – many of which were under the Kaplan report more than two dozen recommendations.

The field was expanded by four teams to reflect the men’s 68-team bracket. The number of people working on the ladies’ tournament has been increased, so that each event now has a staff of 10. The signs for the women’s tournament will be strengthened, especially in the early rounds, and gifts and other benefits for male and female players will be aligned.

Most visible is the women’s tournament, which tipped off on Wednesday, for the first time the popular “March Madness” branding, which has long been used exclusively by the men’s tournament. The NCAA had previously refused to allow women to use the slogan, even though it had the right to use it for both tournaments, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

Perhaps the biggest organizational change: For the first time in the 40-year history of the ladies’ tournament, men’s and women’s basketball team work together.

“Back to when Lynn and I came here to the NCAA, the two committees operated fundamentally independently – supporting each other, certainly, but not in a collaborative way that happened this year,” said Dan Gavitt, NCAA Senior Vize. President of Basketball, in a telephone interview with Lynn Holzman, VP for NCAA Women’s Basketball, in the Journal. Gavitt added that the men’s and women’s basketball committees are “very much connected in the hip and I think they will be for eternity.”

Earlier, major changes were also considered – namely the possibility that the NCAA will sell stand-alone broadcast rights to the women’s basketball tournament, which is now bundled with 28 other NCAA championships in a package for which ESPN $ 34 million d ‘Year pays. . The NCAA men’s basketball broadcast deal with CBS / Turner was recently extended by eight years for $ 8.8 billion, and runs through 2032.

The NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament was never set up for a competitive bid, and it alone could be worth about $ 100 million a year after the ESPN deal expires in 2024, a former longtime NBA executive projected in the Kaplan report.

The number of brands announcing the 2022 women’s tournament broadcast this year jumped to 15 from four last year, said Sean Hanrahan, SVP, Sports Brand Solutions-Disney Advertising.

ESPN will use virtual “March Madness” logos on its broadcasts of first- and second-round women’s tournament games, as these on-campus sites do not have the logos on their courts.

Some of the greatest recommendations of the Kaplan report have not been implemented.

The NCAA has not increased the VP of women’s basketball, so the position in seniority is equivalent to the head of men’s basketball, as the Kaplan report recommends. Holzman still reports to Gavitt, who oversees the entire NCAA basketball.

Also, the NCAA corporate sponsorship program, which the Kaplan report found has hampered sports outside of men’s basketball to cultivate sponsors, remains unchanged.

Under that program, CBS / Turner controls the right to sell sponsors in all 90 NCAA sports championships. It retains that revenue, which was spent more than $ 200 million last year, according to an estimate from the IEG Sponsorship Intelligence Database. Then CBS / Turner pays the NCAA a fixed amount for the sponsorship rights and the broadcast rights for the men’s basketball tournament. Last year, that cost was $ 850 million.

CBS / Turner pricing for NCAA sponsors – which run as high as $ 35 million a year, according to analysts – and its required advertising purchases for men’s basketball “makes it virtually impossible” for a company interested only in women’s basketball or another sport is official NCAA sponsor, according to the Kaplan report. It has recommended the sale of non-conflicting sponsor categories for sports outside of men’s basketball.

Representatives of CBS / Turner declined to comment. An NCAA spokeswoman said revenue from the CBS / Turner deal will help support all NCAA sports championships. She added that the review of this contract was in line with the “longer-term recommendations” in the report and that “we are not speculating on any potential changes at this time.”

UCLA women’s basketball coach Cori Close called the NCAA changes in the women’s tournament “really good, required steps, and they need to be appreciated and recognized and celebrated.”

But, she added, NCAA dealers are holding back the potential of the women’s tournament, whose television ratings have risen over all rounds over the past year, limited by the championship audience of 4.1 million, the largest since 2014.

“We are not asking to be a charity. We are not asking to be a cause,” Close said. “We ask to treat ourselves as a product of what we have earned, the assets in which we have earned credibility.”

Another great idea recommended in the Kaplan report to combine the final fours of men and women on a weekend in the same city was meant to create a huge event where schools and NCAA staff, media and Sponsors can all gather – instead of splitting up into two different cities, as they do now.

The NCAA men’s and women’s basketball committees have voted not to pursue a combined final four until at least 2031, the round of host-city selections that are now beginning, Gavitt said. They want to see where the current momentum of women’s tournaments and the recent NCAA changes can take it, he said. The Women’s Final Four has sold out in seven of the last eight years.

The organizers of the women’s tournament, however, are considering alternative plans such as holding the two Final Fours on different weekends, Holzman said.

“They look at the totality of what’s best for the championship and the health of the championship and where the areas of growth are actually needed,” she said.

One thing that will not be the focus this year: Weightlifting. Last year’s tournaments had unusual setups because they were held entirely in individual cities to reduce the covid spread – Indianapolis for men, San Antonio for women – instead of in many different places, as in a typical year. NCAA championships usually have no weight room.

Write to Rachel Bachman at Rachel.Bachman@wsj.com