MW Women's March Madness teams are being paid for the first time - but here's why they're splitting $200 million less than the men

By Weston Blasi

Players won't receive any of the prize money themselves, but their schools' athletic departments and sports programs reap the rewards

March Madness is back and ready to bring in almost $1 billion in revenue for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. And this year, NCAA women's basketball teams are getting a piece of that action for the first time - although still not as much as the men.

The brackets for the tournament celebrating the best of men's and women's college basketball are about to be set, and fans are looking forward to 67 games packed into 21 days in one of the biggest sporting events of the year. March Madness is also one of the most lucrative events for the NCAA, whose revenue jumped to a record $1.38 billion in fiscal-year 2024, according to a copy of the organization's most recent financial statement, with a large portion of that coming from the men's basketball tournament.

Yet while the men's teams have been paid for March Madness since 1991, the women's teams haven't been compensated since their first NCAA tournament in 1982.

The NCAA didn't prioritize selling TV rights for the women's tournament for many years - and only allowed the women's tournament to begin using the "March Madness" branding in 2022 - because of a perceived lack of an audience. But recent tournaments' television ratings and the recent star power associated with the sport (hello, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese) have led the NCAA to update its payout policy to include women's teams, too.

To be clear, NCAA policy doesn't allow for individual players to be paid directly by the organization or its member schools. These payments are meant for participating teams, not individual players. The payments, which can be thought of as prize money, are calculated based on how far a team makes it into the tournament, among other factors and coefficients called "performance units."

But like other aspects of college sports, there is a pay disparity on the March Madness court. The men's tournament is expected to award hundreds of millions of dollars to its participating teams, while the women's tournament will distribute an estimated $15 million this year, per the Associated Press. This disparity is mainly due to the TV media-rights deals for each tournament, which is much larger for the men's bracket.

Here's how it breaks down: A vast majority of the NCAA's revenue comes from its TV and broadcasting deals. CBS and TNT Sports - owned by Paramount Global (PARA) and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. (WBD), respectively - pay an average of about $1.1 billion a year to broadcast the men's tournament, while ESPN - owned by Walt Disney Co. $(DIS)$ - has broadcast rights to the women's tournament, for which it pays about $65 million per year. These are long-term TV deals - with the NCAA, CBS and TNT Sports most recently agreeing an eight-year extension to their previous 14-year deal for the men's tournament, which now runs through 2032.

"Historically, the NCAA made all its money by selling the men's March Madness TV rights - about a billion dollars a year - and they didn't even bother to individually price anything else out," Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who specializes in sports, told MarketWatch. "Its a gigantic difference."

The NCAA will initially pay the women's March Madness teams 26% of the TV deal, which is the same percentage that the men's teams got in the first year that performance units were introduced (1991). That comes out to $15 million in prize money, which will increase to $25 million, or 41% of the revenue, by 2028, according to the AP.

The men's March Madness teams, meanwhile, now get 24% of the media-rights deal in prize money, which comes out to approximately $216 million, according to the NCAA's financial statements and reporting from the AP.

"When economists mean equal pay for equal work, it's not as if a tournament that draws a lot more viewers should be paid as much as players in a tournament that has less viewers, but that they are treated the same in terms of percentages," said Matheson.

The NCAA did not respond to request for comment.

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The women's March Madness system mirrors the men's basketball performance-unit program. Each of the 32 conferences with an automatic bid earns one unit, with additional units awarded for teams securing at-large bids in the 68-team bracket. So a team advancing to the Final Four could generate around $1.26 million for its conference over the next three years through financial performance rewards.

Tournament payouts will be sent out to schools' conferences and then filtered to university athletic departments, and not directly to the players, the NCAA said. So even a long tournament run for UConn Huskies star guard Paige Bueckers still won't directly lead to any money for her. Rather, the money will go toward funding the University of Connecticut's sports programs and covering expenses like travel, facilities, coaching salaries, scholarships and other costs.

College players can still get paid separately though name, image and likeness deals, however. Payments for those agreements do not come directly from schools or the NCAA, and instead come from businesses and donor-funded NIL collectives.

In addition to Bueckers, the top women's basketball talent gearing up for March Madness includes the University of Southern California's JuJu Watkins and Louisiana State University's Flau'jae Johnson.

The women's bracket will look to keep up the historic momentum from last year's tournament. For the first time ever, the 2024 NCAA women's championship game had better ratings than the men's title game. The men's championship game between UConn and Purdue averaged 14.82 million viewers, compared to the 18.87 million who watched South Carolina defeat Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the women's final.

In fact, the 2024 women's tournament broke viewership records across the board. The Elite Eight, Final Four and championship rounds all reached new ratings highs for women's March Madness. The South Carolina-Iowa title game was the most viewed women's basketball game in history and the most watched basketball game - men's or women's, college or professional - since 2019.

But despite the record viewership and heightened overall interest, the pay disparity between men's and women's teams won't close much in the near term. That's because, like its men's basketball TV deal, the NCAA's TV deal with ESPN - which grants the broadcaster exclusive rights to 40 championships across college sports, including women's basketball - runs through 2032.

"If the trends we are seeing continue, those [money] gaps are going to shrink over time," Matheson said. "The best single way you can support equality and equity is by literally tuning in to women's games."

Selection Sunday - the day when the March Madness brackets will be officially set - will take place this Sunday for both tournaments.

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-Weston Blasi

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March 14, 2025 07:30 ET (11:30 GMT)

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