Women's NCAA Tournament blew up in 2021 over inequality. It was a blessing in disguise.

When an Oregon player posted a social media video of a small rack of weights at the 2021 NCAA women’s basketball tournament in San Antonio and compared it to the fully-appointed gym provided for the men’s event in Indianapolis, it quickly exploded into one of the biggest public relations crises in the association’s history. 

With a nation emerging from COVID and still highly attuned to the social-justice movements that had swept through the country over the previous year after the murder of George Floyd, the NCAA’s treatment of one of its marquee events was suddenly on trial in the court of public opinion. The resulting uproar was broad, as voices within the sport aired grievances and pointed out inequalities between the men’s and women’s tournaments that for years had been hidden in plain sight. 

“Women’s basketball has been crying out for help for so long, just beating our heads against the wall over and over,” Sedona Prince, the player who sparked the debate, told USA TODAY Sports last week. “That’s what prompted me to speak out.”

Though women’s college basketball had cultivated its own fan base and shown signs of growth in various metrics, its tournament had been perpetually overshadowed by the concurrent men’s event, which had stronger parity, more comprehensive media coverage and — as the world soon learned — more investment and attention from NCAA brass. 

But the firestorm that followed Prince’s video changed the equation. While news cycles throughout the 2021 tournament revealed painful embarrassments for the NCAA and former president Mark Emmert, there had never been so much interest in the women’s tournament.

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Now, several significant voices involved in the sport have a different characterization of what happened three years ago: Blessing in disguise. 

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“Within anything where there has been significant change in our country or the world, often it is initiated by something — a crisis or an inflection point,” said NCAA vice president of women’s basketball Lynn Holzman. “I believe that with our championship in 2021, it was that: A period of time when the proverbial curtain, if you will, was pulled back. It did initiate, I think, a lot of self-reflection by all the different levels of our sport.”

These days, the conversation around the sport is almost unrecognizable. Though members of the women’s basketball community can still point to some frustrating inequities and believe there’s still significant room to grow, this year’s tournament will mark the most-anticipated and likely most-watched event in the history of women’s basketball. 

With the right matchups, there’s even a possibility the women’s Final Four could garner more viewers than the men’s — something that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. 

“People are finally realizing that it’s not just, 'Hey we’re going to beg you to come, beg you to watch,' " said Christine Plonsky, a Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame member and longtime administrator at Texas. “People have figured out it’s entertainment and the product is good.”

That awakening has undoubtedly grown from the confluence of stars currently atop the women’s game, led by Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese, along with South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, who bridges the gap between generations that watched her win three Olympic gold medals as a player and two NCAA championships as a coach — and is favored to win her third this April. 

Not only are these big personalities winning, they’re marketable: Staley has appeared in Aflac commercials alongside former Duke men's coach Mike Krzyzewski; Clark is starring in State Farm commercials with Chris Paul, and Reese has a merchandise deal to sell her “Bayou Barbie”-branded clothes at DICK’s Sporting Goods.

“If you had told anyone this was where we’d be in 2024, they would have never believed you,” said Prince, who played for TCU this season after transferring from Oregon.

Controversy drew major news coverage

But women’s basketball has had superstar players, iconic coaches and dynastic programs before who did not break through to the mainstream sports fan in the same way. 

Though difficult to quantify, there’s likely some connection between the current explosion of women’s college basketball popularity and the amount of attention the sport garnered in 2021 during a time of year when men’s basketball typically drives the conversation. Even if it was for a troubling or controversial reason, it was the most substantial mainstream news coverage the sport had ever received. 

“It has to be related,” said Jim Livengood, a former athletics director at Arizona, UNLV and Washington State who was heavily involved in gender equity initiatives at the NCAA level during his career. “You wonder if change would have manifested itself if (2021) hadn’t happened. Like most things in life, it’s about the right fit, the right place, the right time. It’s congruent with what women’s basketball needed. It was a jolt, and it got everyone’s attention.”

Many of the issues that came to the surface in 2021 weren’t new. Examples of inequity and frustrations with how the NCAA marketed women’s basketball were raised eight years earlier in a white paper delivered by Val Ackerman, the former president of the WNBA, who had been hired by the NCAA as a consultant to study the state of the sport. The NCAA had also ignored signs that interest in women’s sports overall was growing, not recognizing attendance and TV ratings for softball and gymnastics, in particular, were indicative of a wider phenomenon. 

But circumstances around the 2021 tournament put those issues in stark relief. With the NCAA still grappling over how to manage COVID — vaccines were only made widely available around the start of March Madness that year — it decided to build bubbles to hold the two championships: Men’s teams all went to Indianapolis, while the women were based in San Antonio.

The bubble isolation factor

Having teams essentially isolated in one location for the entire tournament made it easy to compare things side-by-side: Not just weight rooms but the quality of meals, gift bags and other amenities available to the players. With social media giving athletes a way to present visual evidence to the wider public, the NCAA had no way to spin things. If the NCAA’s mandate was to deliver equal championship experiences to the men and women, it had undeniably failed.

“It was a great thing that it happened,” said Arizona coach Adia Barnes, whose team made the championship game that season. “It forced us to think about stuff we never thought about before. There was so much stuff we were used to and just accepted. It was the norm.”

The outrage lasted well beyond the tournament, and the NCAA hired an independent firm to conduct a gender equity assessment of its entire championship menu. Issues like budgets and staffing were addressed to align the tournaments as closely as possible, and changes were made to boost cross-promotion and sponsorship activation opportunities. 

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The NCAA also agreed that the “March Madness” branding, which had only been used for the men’s event, should also be floor logos and part of the nomenclature for the women’s tournament.

“Little things stand alone,” Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez said. “But collectively, it was a statement about how these properties weren’t equal. These were things people had been saying for years behind the scenes, but it finally galvanized in a moment that things started to get done.”

Staley, Mulkey salaries make statement

Following the 2021 tournament, LSU made arguably the splashiest hire in the history of the sport by luring three-time national championship coach Kim Mulkey from Baylor. LSU’s willingness to spend an average of more than $2.9 million per year for a coach — despite women’s basketball losing money — marked yet another shift in how the sport was perceived, especially at well-resourced schools in major conferences. Known for the flashy outfits she wears on the sideline and comments that sometimes trend toward the politically incorrect, but also for winning big, Mulkey immediately brought another big school and its fan base into the conversation. 

Later that year, as Staley entered into contract negotiations with South Carolina, she was both public and forthright in linking her salary — and the pay scale it would create throughout the sport — to the continued fight for equity.

“This is an equitable statement,” she said after inking a seven-year, $21.4 million contract that put her on par with UConn’s Geno Auriemma. “And in the midst of all our inequities in our country, I hope it’s a turning point.”

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For a sport whose leaders had generally come from the nascent era of women’s basketball, when the product was either ridiculed or ignored by all but its niche of hardcore fans, this was a completely new way of talking about and fighting for their piece of the pie. 

Suddenly, new conversations and considerations were cropping up all around college athletics. Plonsky recalled a Big 12 meeting around this period in which former commissioner Bob Bowlsby warned that holding the women’s basketball tournament at Kansas City’s historic Municipal Auditorium rather than the modern T-Mobile Center where the men play would make the league a target when a player or coach inevitably spoke up about the difference in venues. This year, the women played at T-Mobile for the first time, drawing a record crowd. 

“All of it has caused deeper thinking, more commitment and more investment overall in the women’s game, and it’s paying off in spades,” Plonsky said. “Coaches and staffers tend to be pretty dutiful people. But I promise you, in today’s environment, when kids tell the truth and tell a hard truth, people respond.”

NIL unlocks marketing potential in women's sports

Though it wasn’t directly related to the fiasco in San Antonio, another important milestone occurred in 2021, when the NCAA allowed athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness for the first time. Though much of the focus immediately went to football and men’s basketball players suddenly being allowed to make money and the potential impact on recruiting, it also unlocked the marketing potential in women’s sports.

By the 2022 tournament, UConn’s Paige Bueckers had signed deals with Gatorade and StockX, while South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston was representing companies like Bose and Bojangles, a fast-food chain. The NIL interest confirmed what many inside the women’s game had been arguing for years: Many of its players were marketable personalities who could connect with fans beyond the framework of a basketball team, where individualism hadn’t necessarily been embraced as much as it was in the men’s game. 

“Their engagement levels are through the roof, thanks to the authenticity and vulnerability they bring to social spaces,” said Bonnie Bernstein, a veteran sports journalist and broadcaster who is now founder and CEO of Walk Swiftly Productions. “You want to watch these young women play because you feel a human connection. If you’re a brand supporting the Caitlin Clarks, the Angel Reeses, the Flau'jae Johnsons, the Haley Cavinders, you’re reaching younger fans and cultivating your next generation of consumers in a really powerful way. It’s just smart business.”

Stakeholders in the sport can point to other factors that led to a spike in popularity, including a more fluid group of teams making deep NCAA Tournament runs and a legion of NBA players using their social media platforms to promote women’s basketball and make it more socially acceptable for men to watch. 

The role of 'Clarkonomics'

But there’s no denying the effect of a phenomenon like Clark emerging at a time when new eyeballs were being drawn to the college game. Clark’s presence last year helped ABC and ESPN draw a record 9.9 million viewers to Iowa's championship game against LSU and an 87% increase in overall Final Four viewership from the previous year. 

“We could put together a list of 10 things that have happened in the last few years that have helped push this along in a very organic way,” said Debbie Yow, a former basketball coach who became one of the most prominent women in college sports administration as the athletics director at Maryland and then North Carolina State. “It’s now cool to be a fan of collegiate women’s basketball. It used to not be cool. It feels important, it looks important and it’s on TV, so it must be important. That’s what can happen when you give it its due.”

That frenzy has carried over to this season, in which Clark’s Iowa team has sold out buildings all across the Big Ten and scored the second- and third-highest television ratings for regular-season games of either gender. 

If top-seeded Iowa makes the Final Four again, it could conceivably draw more viewers on ESPN and ABC than the men’s event, which this year will be broadcast on TBS.

“It’s Exhibit A on what a single player can do for a sport,” said Ackerman, who is now the Big East commissioner. “I’d love to see some data around this, but it does seem like whether it’s women’s basketball, softball, gymnastics, volleyball — women’s team sports in particular — are in a period of upward trajectory. And there’s probably not one reason or one person responsible for all of it. But the fans are talking. They’re showing up at games, viewership numbers. More people seem to be interested and care.”

However it got to this place, the conversation in women’s basketball is now turning a bit from equity toward how to capitalize on what longtime broadcaster Debbie Antonelli called the new “Clarkonomics” of the sport.

For a long time, women’s basketball was criticized for not selling tickets or getting ratings. Now that it’s been proved a good product can do both, how will that translate to increased economic potential? 

“If the first 50 years of Title IX were about opportunity, the next 50 should be about investment,” said Antonelli, who calls games on ESPN and CBS. “I think it took a Caitlin Clark to open everyone’s eyes. We needed that. But we can’t just have this be a moment in time. It has to be the moment that moves us forward. There are new people coming to our game, and that’s important. Now we have to keep them.”

For the NCAA, it’s going to require a delicate balance between ambition and pragmatism.Coming out of the San Antonio mess, some stakeholders were pushing the NCAA to sell the future broadcast rights to the women’s tournament as a standalone property during its next negotiation in hopes of maximizing its value. 

Despite the Clark factor — “You could call it a supercharger,” American Athletic Conference commissioner and former television executive Mike Aresco said — the NCAA opted in January to once again bundle the women’s basketball tournament among 40 championship events in an eight-year, $920 million deal with ESPN. It’s worth roughly three times the current TV deal and goes into effect next season.

Essentially, the NCAA decided that it would serve the greater good by using women’s basketball to help maximize exposure and revenue for a variety of sports — including women’s sports like softball and volleyball that are also growing in popularity. 

“I think that’s a fair decision,” Ackerman said. 

But more contentious battles are ahead. 

Could men's, women's Final Fours be in same city?

Discussions are underway about how to tie women’s basketball tournament revenue to so-called “units” that are tied to how far teams advance in the bracket. On the men’s side, these units generate considerable amounts of money — $2 million for each round a team plays in, distributed to its conference over a six-year period. Women’s coaches say this type of distribution model encourages administrators to invest in men’s basketball and are hopeful there will be a similar outcome when women’s hoops start to get units, which new NCAA president Charlie Baker has said should start with the 2025 tournament.

Women’s tournament revenue has never been distributed in that manner, and there is some concern among administrators that a smaller unit number for women will have the optic effect of going backward on equity. It seems likely the NCAA will have to figure out a way to tie the two tournaments’ revenue model together.

There’s also an appetite to at least experiment with a joint men’s and women’s Final Four in the same city, which was one of the recommendations that came out of the 2022 equity review. Ackerman compared the potential of such a move in elevating women’s basketball to the tennis Grand Slams, where women’s matches sometimes get better billing than the men, depending on matchups and star power. 

"I think you have the potential to create a colossal event for college basketball by bringing the two events together, creating efficiencies in terms of operation," she said. “Let’s dream big here.” 

So far, though, the NCAA has resisted moving toward that model. Holzman said the membership has studied the possibilities of a combined event and is happy with the current trajectory of the women’s game and specifically the Final Four, which has sold out 11 of the last 12 years. Because the NCAA has already awarded men's Final Fours through 2030 and women's Final Fours through 2031, a joint event would likely be well into the future.

Who knows where women’s college basketball will be by then.

Since the embarrassment in San Antonio, the last three years have borne witness to possibilities and conversations that weren’t occurring before. As the tournament begins this week, the sport has never been in better shape. 

“I think this is an awakening that probably needed to happen,” Ackerman told USA TODAY Sports in 2021. “I think it will jump-start more change. I think people should not underestimate the power of women to get some things done now because of this. Maybe it'll turn out to be a blessing.”

Her words couldn’t have been more prescient. 

Contributing: USA TODAY Sports' Steve Berkowitz and Lindsay Schnell