South Carolina women's basketball: Why Dawn Staley wants "units"

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This season the NCAA has made significant efforts to address the inequalities imposed on the women’s basketball tournament. But there are still issues to address, and South Carolina basketball’s Dawn Staley believes the biggest issue remaining is units, something most people have never heard of. 

The two most visible changes the NCAA made were expanding the tournament to 68 teams and allowing the women’s tournament to use March Madness branding, a trademarked phrase that was previously restricted to the men’s tournament. Both moves were successful, at least in the short term.

The First Four was not played at a single site, like the men’s First Four, due to logistics. Regardless, the players and coaches who participated enjoyed the experience, in part because of “March Madness.” The NCAA didn’t just permit use of the phrase, as many expected, it pushed it. It made the First Four feel like part of the tournament.

“The signage, you walk around the arena and you see the visiting side, what’s happening, a lot of signage,” Staley said following the first round game. “It feels different. Like it doesn’t feel like we’re at our home gym. I know it’s an advantage for us, but you can’t tell from walking around the building and seeing all the signage. So it’s a really good start to shedding some of the inequities that occur prior to this tournament, and it’s cool for the first year.”

But something was missing.

“Yeah, the units,” Staley said. “Like men’s basketball they get units, and those units equal dollar signs. I would like for us to divvy it up like the 68 teams get divvied up once the tournament ends.”

Units

Units are a part of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that most people don’t know about, and they don’t exist in women’s basketball. Units are earned by playing games and paid out to conferences. Each unit is paid out over six years, which can represent a huge financial boost. Most conferences split the money evenly among schools, while a few split the money and give a bonus to the school that earns the unit. First Four games earn units, which is why conferences, especially small conferences, had no problem with the so-called play-in games: it’s a chance for an extra unit. For schools that don’t play football, and some that do, units can be the athletics department’s biggest source of revenue.

In 2022, each unit is worth $338,887. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but each unit is paid out for six years, meaning one unit is worth $2,033,322. That is a lot, especially for non-Power 5 conferences.

The money comes from the “basketball fund,” which is basically the men’s tournament’s television contracts. That means the payouts are market-driven, something Staley understands.

“It’s being able to get similar, I guess, equity. Like CBS, TBS, TNT, TRU TV. Right? That’s the men’s tournament. So when we’re able to market ourselves in that way, that’s a lot of dollar signs, when you’re able to be in all of those networks. And I’m not saying anything against ESPN, which they do a great job at putting our game forward, but let’s make it competitive. Let somebody bid out our tournament and maybe we’ll have a few more networks to show our games,” the South Carolina women’s basketball coach said last weekend in Greensboro. “But it’s just little things like that that make a huge difference. And I’m not trying to start any controversy, but units, you know. Our game can be a game which is valuable, like in terms of dollars and cents. And once we’re able to get there, we’ll find our true value.”

Lost revenue

Staley was referring to how the NCAA sold the media rights to the women’s basketball tournament. The men’s tournament was opened up for bidding, leading to the massive CBS/Turner deal that is worth nearly $1 billion per year. The NCAA sold the women’s tournament rights to ESPN as part of a package deal that includes all its other championships. That severely limited the earning power of the tournament.

The Kaplan Report, commissioned by the NCAA to analyze how sexist the NCAA has been, estimated the television rights are worth somewhere between $80 and $112 million annually. ESPN currently pays $34 million for 29 different championships, including the women’s tournament, college baseball, softball, soccer, and every other sport.

There have been beginning discussions about introducing units into the women’s tournament, according to NCAA president Mark Emmert.

“The answer is it’s entirely up to the schools what they want to do in that regard,” Emmert said. “It’s a complicated relationship because the championship on the men’s side, the relative weight of moving forward in the tournament has actually been diminished over time because there are those in the membership schools, in the membership, that think that there shouldn’t be that much emphasis on winning in a tournament. So the first unit, if you will, goes out to everybody quite independent of what they do in the tournament. Then secondly, there’s been an emphasis on the need to meet academic standards, for example, and a variety of other things.”

Emmert said there is no timetable for making a decision about units, but he is optimistic something will be decided in the next year. He also said there is a discussion about whether women’s units would be paid entirely out of women’s tournament revenue or they would be supplemented by revenue from the men’s tournament.

“The best and biggest change will be when we get to renegotiate our media contracts around this tournament and all of our championships around all of our sports, including all the other women’s sports,” Emmert said. “So those will present really meaningful chances to make even more investments than we have now.”

ESPN’s contract expires after 2024, so the new television contract will be negotiated soon. Women’s basketball wouldn’t earn a billion dollars a year, but the infusion of $100 million, especially if it rewarded winning, would be a seismic change. There would be guaranteed financial incentive to win.

Included in those negotiations will be ways to make the women’s tournament more marketable since the Kaplan Report found the NCAA suppressed marketability for fear of detracting from the men’s tournament. The Kaplan report suggested holding the men’s and women’s Final Fours at the same site, an idea that has been met with resistance. However, Lynn Holzman, the NCAA’s Vice President for Women’s Basketball, said they are looking at shifting the schedule of the women’s tournament so that the Final Fours are not held on the same weekend.

It all sounds good, but given that it is the NCAA, there is a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, it was the NCAA that first established the discrimination it is now being tasked with correcting.

“We’ve got to look way down the years, five, six, seven years, as many years as it took for them to uncover what was happening to our tournament,” Staley said. “So great start. Let’s just continue to lift our tournament up, and hopefully we’ll find ourselves in a revenue-producing tournament.”

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