NCAA to bypass women’s tournament
As you hem and dress your brackets for NCAA tournaments, wondering who will go far and who will disappoint, there is only one certainty:
The NCAA, at every opportunity, is going to screw it up. Usually dramatically.
The NCAA has had a year to take the most basic steps to achieve fairness between men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, and all it has achieved is finally allowing women to use the “March Madness” logo and trademark. It’s been six months since an outside firm released a damning review of the disparities, and the NCAA is still hesitant on the recommendations.
It’s not difficult. Especially when you’ve been put on notice five times in the past 30 years, as three members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform reminded NCAA President Mark Emmert in a letter to him. was sent on Monday.
“You have failed to take meaningful action to correct the shortcomings identified by the committee and by outside review, and you have failed to ensure gender equity in NCAA athletic programs,” said Emmert in the letter, which was made public on Tuesday. It was sent by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, DN.Y. and Chairman of the Committee; Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D.N.J. ; and Rep. Jackie Speier, D-California.
“Information obtained by the Committee shows that as of February, the NCAA had still not responded to key recommendations of the NCAA external review, raising doubts about your commitment to equity among gender in college sport.
Oh, those doubts were erased last year, after Oregon forward Sedona Prince’s video of the vastly different weight rooms at men’s and women’s tournaments went viral.
Emmert and the rest of the NCAA offered a litany of excuses for why these and other disparities existed, each as flimsy as the next. In the end, the NCAA was so focused on turning the men’s basketball tournament into a billion dollar cash cow that it just didn’t care in the many ways it bypassed female athletes.
In their letter, Maloney, Sherrill and Speier pointed out that the NCAA’s own associate director of finance for the NCAA championships, Jeff O’Barr, had said in an email that the split between the men’s and women’s tournament budgets from 2013 to 21 was “constantly 70%-30% (plus or minus a percent here or there.)”
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Kaplan, Hecker and Fink, the law firm the NCAA hired last year to conduct an “independent fairness review,” also found that the value of tournament loot given to male players was double that given to women, from $125.55 to $60.42.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to recognize that those numbers — and the NCAA’s priorities — are seriously out of whack. But when you don’t value women, it doesn’t matter how stark the disparities are.
And before the keyboard warrior misogynists start talking about the differences in income generated, give women the same kind of support and promotion that men have had for the past four decades and we’ll talk about it. But the NCAA is so short-sighted that it never even considered leaving money on the table with women’s sports.
Broadcast rights for women’s basketball alone are worth between $81 million and $112 million per year in 2025, according to an estimate by Ed Desser, an independent media expert hired by Kaplan. Currently, they’re tossed in with the rights to more than two dozen other sports, for which ESPN pays the full $34 million a year.
NCAA corporate sponsorships are also structured in such a way that it is nearly impossible for companies that only want to partner with women’s sports and their events. Kaplan recommended hiring someone to rectify this and, surprise, surprise, it didn’t happen.
The NCAA also did not change its governing structure so that women’s basketball was equal to men’s basketball. Lynn Holzman, vice president of women’s basketball, continues to report to Dan Gavitt, senior vice president of basketball, whose responsibilities include overseeing “the day-to-day operations of the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship of the NCAA…and (serving) staff. daily contact with the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee and the Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee.
“These are just two of the major recommendations that the NCAA has not implemented or committed to implement, and for which you, as president, have ultimate decision-making authority,” Maloney, Sherrill and Speier to Emmert.
Again, none of this is new.
After the Kaplan report was released in August, Maloney, Sherrill and Speier pointed out that members of the original NCAA Gender Equality Task Force wrote to Emmert in 2014 expressing concern about the “progress and support financial support for female athletes and women’s athletics which have slowed considerably. ”
Three years later, the current Gender Equity Task Force stated that “Forty-five years after the passage of Title IX, equity gaps have not been closed and have stabilized at over the past 15 years”.
Five years later, nothing has changed.
“Congress enacted Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 to promote gender equity in educational settings, including athletics,” Maloney, Sherrill and Speier wrote. “By creating and perpetuating structural inequalities between the men’s and women’s postseason championships, and by failing to implement substantive changes that would correct those inequalities, the NCAA violates the spirit of gender equity as codified in Title IX.”
It’s easy to miss the point in the sterile language of politicians and lawyers, but Emmert and the NCAA’s contempt for female athletes hurts in the real world.
Every time Emmert & Co. discriminates against — let’s call it what it is — female athletes and female sports, they diminish the value of all women. They tell us that our contributions aren’t as valuable, that we don’t deserve to be fairly compensated for our work. They tell us that they don’t see us as equals.
They tell us that we don’t matter.
It’s annoying to have this same battle over and over again, and infuriating to know it will have to be fought again in the not-too-distant future. Because if there’s one certainty in March, and every month of the year, it’s that Emmert and the NCAA will always find a way to disappoint.
Follow USA TODAY sports columnist Nancy Armor on Twitter @nrarmour.
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