Iowa interim athletic director Beth Goetz remembers Lisa Bluder coming to her this spring with a grin on her face about two weeks after the Hawkeyes lost to LSU in the national championship game. The women’s basketball coach had an idea.
Six months later, that idea came to fruition when 55,646 — the largest crowd to attend an NCAA women’s basketball game — packed the football team’s Kinnick Stadium last month to watch Iowa face DePaul in an exhibition. The concept came on the heels of the national championship game setting a record as the most-viewed women’s college basketball game ever.
Goetz’s response was simple.
“Let’s make this happen,” she said. “You want to figure out how you can continue to use that moment to help that [growth].”
Women’s college basketball had an incredible moment last spring that culminated with the title game. ESPN announced that viewership for the Final Four, Elite Eight and Sweet 16 set records, with 9.9 million watching the final. By comparison, the just-completed World Series averaged 9.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings. People who rarely paid attention to women’s basketball were talking about Iowa’s Associated Press player of the year, Caitlin Clark, and LSU’s NCAA tournament most outstanding player, Angel Reese. The conversation surrounding the women’s Final Four in Dallas largely overshadowed the men’s event in Houston.
As a new season tips off Monday, women’s teams across the country are trying to capitalize on having more interest in their games than ever before. Iowa and LSU sold out their season tickets. South Carolina and Notre Dame will open the season in Paris for the first NCAA basketball game — men or women — played there. The goal is to continue to ride that wave of momentum.
“The product is the narrative. It continues to deliver at a high level,” Hall of Famer and analyst Debbie Antonelli said. “We have built household names inside the game, and their brand have helped elevate the game and we’ve got to keep doing that.”
College athletics’ new name, image and likeness rules have proved to be a boon for the sport as well, with women’s basketball players among those best positioned to take advantage of the financial opportunities. On3.com projects valuations for college athletes using data points such as performance, influence and exposure. Reese, with her 5.2 million social media followers, ranks seventh with a $1.7 million valuation. That puts her ahead of Heisman Trophy candidate quarterbacks J.J. McCarthy of Michigan, Bo Nix of Oregon and Michael Penix Jr. of Washington. Reese’s teammate Flau’jae Johnson, who is also a popular musician, ranks 21st with 3.1 million followers and a $1.1 million valuation. Clark, who became the first college athlete to sign a deal with State Farm, ranks 49th with 1 million followers and a $764,000 valuation. Connecticut guard Paige Bueckers ranks 74th (1.6 million followers, $643,000 valuation), and new LSU guard Hailey Van Lith is 100th (1.1 million followers, $562,000 valuation).
The women are showing up in advertising campaigns seen across the country.
“I’ll be watching a game and then a commercial pops up and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, [TCU center] Sedona [Prince]!’ ” Maryland forward Faith Masonius said. “I’m like, ‘I know her!’ It’s cool. Or like just random people like, [Connecticut guard] Azzi [Fudd] or Paige, seeing them in commercials.
“Obviously social media plays a huge factor in that because women’s basketball has always been women’s basketball. I think people are just starting to realize how good we actually are, which is crazy because social media can do that. You’ve got this platform, and then people start to watch and they’re like, ‘Oh, they actually are … great to watch.’ ”
Lee McGinnis, a professor of marketing at Stonehill College, described the scenario as an example of the halo effect. As a point of reference, he explained that Michael Jordan was probably the most popular athlete in the world in the 1990s, a household name even to those uninterested in sports, in an era without social media. The interest in Jordan translated to more fans of the Chicago Bulls and the NBA as a whole.
“That one player that generates that kind of enthusiasm is going to help the league as a whole through the halo effect,” McGinnis said. “There’s a handful of really good players right now that are dominating the social media and the airwaves and the telecasts and things like that, but that eventually spreads out to these other teams. … It does trickle down to these other teams in these other leagues. It makes everybody else gain exposure at the same time. You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. … This isn’t the time to be shy. It’s time to be bold and get this sport out there, because what helps one individual player or one individual program is going to help the [sport] overall.”
Speaking of timing, the television deal with ESPN for all Division I NCAA championships, excluding the men’s basketball tournament, expires in August 2024. Sports Business Journal reported that the 2011 deal was signed for $500 million over 13 years, an average of approximately $38.5 million annually. Two years ago, the NCAA commissioned law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink to conduct a gender equity review, which concluded that the Division I women’s basketball tournament would be worth between $81 million and $112 million annually beginning in 2025. And that was when the report was published in 2021. Continuing to provide proof of growth can only increase the value of the product.
“I don’t think last year was a fluke by any stretch of the imagination,” said Lori Williams, LSU’s deputy director of athletics for leadership and strategy. “And so now it’s just a matter of those who are negotiating and having those conversations to really place the value where, I think, last year just solidified what many already knew, that the product was there. The interest was there. … Women’s basketball is here and is ready to be considered for those opportunities for media rights and the dollars and revenue that come from that in a way that prior to this time has not been a part of the discussion in isolation.”
Still, there’s plenty of work to be done by individual institutions and the NCAA overall. It was just two years ago when inequities between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments were on full display at the women’s Final Four in San Antonio — from weight room facilities to marketing around the city. There are already unpleasant murmurs about the 2024 Final Four being held in Cleveland, with the two NCAA tournament regional sites set for Albany, N.Y., and Portland, Ore. Antonelli has been a proponent of a single site for the tournament, advocating for a destination city such as Las Vegas.
There’s also the fact that conferences don’t receive payouts from women’s teams advancing in the tournament. Sportico reported that men’s teams’ conferences receive about $2 million per game played before the championship matchup. And Maryland Coach Brenda Frese pointed to a need for better nonconference schedules to create more intriguing matchups that would engage fans earlier in the season.
“There’s always a shared responsibility … at an institutional level, at a conference level,” Goetz said. “It takes all of us to prioritize and recognize that this moment exists and that we can lean into it and continue to make sure it thrives.”