As the tournament begins next week, names from the past — UConn and Houston — are at the top of the bracket.getty images
Sharpies are cracked. Productivity in offices drops. Phones and tablets will be set to stream. All of it is tied to the opening moments of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament that tips off next week.
This, after all, is March.
“I still think [basketball is] foundational to college athletics,” said Baylor Athletic Director Mack Rhoades. “It still remains a cornerstone. Basketball has the ability to have a great brand impact for an institution, and there’s still something magical about the NCAA Tournament.”
Over the course of the past three years, in which football-driven realignment and money grabs have sent the collegiate ecosystem into a topsy-turvy fight, men’s college basketball persists as a sinewy secondary character in a melodrama that feels as much “The Young and the Restless” as “Succession.”
But where exactly does that leave the sport and tournament that captures millions of viewers each spring?
It’s complicated.
The economics of college sports have changed dramatically in the past decade. College football has become an even bigger monetary behemoth, dwarfed only by the NFL in the American sports landscape. Women’s basketball, for its efforts, also has experienced exponential growth. The NCAA’s recent $920 million media rights deal with ESPN — heavily rooted in the value of the women’s tournament — is proof of such. But where men’s basketball was once a crucial economic driver for high-major schools, its impact on bottom lines has changed significantly compared to the outsized necessity for football success.
College sports are replete with questions about the future — employment status; collective bargaining; transfer portal; name, image and likeness; a potential SEC-Big Ten breakaway, etc. The combination of these generational shifts occurring all at once has the entire enterprise in a pretzel.
Yet in this world that has been engulfed by chaos, the general feeling around men’s basketball is simple: The NCAA has a good thing going; keep it rolling.
“Basketball is a rallying point,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said. “I was asked to be involved in the Division I Transformation Committee and we were asked, ‘What binds Division I together right now?’ I would argue, as of right now, it’s basketball, period, and it’s March [Madness] with an exclamation point, because that’s the one venue where now almost 400 colleges and universities do have some level of interaction.”
Purdue star Zach Edey will help lead college basketball into prime time once again.getty images
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Then-Indiana athletic director Fred Glass walked onto the playing surface at Memorial Stadium in Bloomington, the stands awash in red, and glanced around.
The 63-year-old stadium underwent significant renovations over Glass’s 11 years atop IU’s athletic department. Still, the seats remained largely empty — at least until that cool August night in 2017, when Ohio State and ESPN’s “College GameDay” made their way to town.
“I just stood in the middle of the field and looked around, soaked it in and just thought, ‘This wouldn’t be what this is if we didn’t close in [the stadium], bring in such high-quality people, investments and things that the average fan didn’t see,’” said Glass, who poured countless new resources into the Hoosiers’ football program during his tenure.
Indiana has never had a glittering football history, while its men’s basketball program is woven into the fabric of the sport. Yet in a day and age in which football revenue has become increasingly crucial to the well-being of athletic departments, IU is one of those “basketball schools” spending heavily on football, on some level, to avoid being left behind.
“There’s more pressure to get football right … because there’s still a great divide in college athletics,” a Power Five athletic director told Sports Business Journal on the condition of anonymity. “Michigan and Ohio State look a lot different than Indiana and Illinois. [If] I’m Indiana, I’m investing in football, because I don’t want to wake up one day and Ohio State, Michigan, Clemson and Florida State get overtures from private equity and say, ‘You know what, we’re going to go create something totally different and we’re gonna leave Indiana behind, because they don’t carry their weight.’”
Kansas AD Travis Goff estimates roughly $35 million to $40 million annually comes into KU’s athletic department via varying avenues associated with the success of the men’s basketball team. Winning a national championship in 2022 certainly helped that equation.
Financial documents show Kansas’s men’s basketball program brought in total operating revenue of $18.3 million, including $2.96 million in NCAA distributions, during the 2023 fiscal year. Head coach Bill Self also ranked as the highest-paid coach in America this year at roughly $13 million. Jayhawks football, meanwhile — among the worst Power Five programs in America prior to head coach Lance Leipold’s hiring in 2021 — accounted for $45.2 million in total operating revenue during that same span, $23.6 million of which came via media rights revenue.
That said, the football money equation at KU extends far beyond revenue. KU’s administration announced an extension for Leipold last month that will run through the 2029 season and reportedly pay him north of $6 million per year. The school is also constructing the mixed-use Gateway District and taking on significant renovations to David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium. The Gateway District project is expected to be primarily funded via private funds from donors, but should reach well into nine figures in cost and will be a significant outside revenue stream.
“Here we are living in the College Football Playoff evolution in real time,” Goff said, referencing ongoing talks about the future format among the CFP’s varying committees. “And that certainly speaks to the strength, the value and the incredibly strong hand that football will continue to play in where college athletics is going. No surprises there. I think it’s only grown and increased in its influence.
“There’s an evolution ahead in the basketball space,” he continued. “As much radical shifting that’s going on in college athletics, whether it be student-athlete compensation, or revenue sharing, or conference contraction or expansion, nothing’s untouchable. I do think basketball will at some juncture, maybe reasonably soon, reach a point where there’s a pretty major discussion on how that shifts going forward.”
Kansas is not unique among basketball powers in seeing football spending grow. Indiana spent more than double on football compared to men’s basketball while posting an underwhelming 4-8 campaign on the gridiron in 2022, according to NCAA financial documents obtained by SBJ. Kentucky and Louisville, which have both won men’s basketball national titles over the past 15 years, spent around 1.7 times more on their respective football programs than men’s basketball during the 2023 fiscal year, according to similar documents.
“I think the perspective from Louisville is a unique one, just because it’s probably one of the few programs in the Power Five that I would contend [basketball] is just as important of a variable as football is in the equation,” Louisville AD Josh Heird said. “Most Power Five programs are going to say, ‘Hey, how do we increase the eyeballs on football?’ But at Louisville, this program, this athletic department was built on the backs of the basketball program, and we’ve got to make sure that our basketball program doesn’t take a backseat to anyone.”
The financial realities of the football-basketball divide is perhaps best magnified in the scope of media rights contracts which, in conjunction with football, shaped the latest swath of conference realignment. The NCAA signed a 14-year deal with CBS Sports and Turner Sports (now called TNT Sports) in 2010 worth $10.8 billion for the rights to the men’s tournament. Six years later, it signed an eight-year, $8.8 billion extension that runs through 2032. Parsing out the annual costs and number of games contained in the package each year (67), those networks are paying roughly $26.9 million per game over the life of the eight-year extension.
“We weren’t going to do a deal unless it was financially responsible and profitable,” outgoing CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus said at the time of the extension. “This is.”
The College Football Playoff, meanwhile, signed its initial deal in 2012 worth an average payment of $608 million per year for just the CFP semifinals and championship, along with four New Year’s Six bowl games that are all televised on ESPN’s family of networks. Using the same math, ESPN is spending around $86.9 million per game on average in its existing contract, while that number will likely grow assuming the CFP and ESPN reach an agreement on a new contract sooner rather than later.
“Quite honestly, I think basketball is settling into probably what it should be,” the Power Five athletic director said. “And that’s not taking anything away from the game. But the financial reality is this is a business and primarily the revenue and expenses are falling under college football. What you’re seeing is the attention and bandwidth is tracking more closely to the revenues. Basketball and football are not the same. I don’t think you can treat them as such anymore, and I think the market is showing that.”
Pricing aside, viewership has shown men’s college basketball has significant staying power. The men’s national title game has averaged 19.79 million viewers since 2013 (no title game was played due to COVID-19 pandemic in 2020) and saw more than 21 million viewers tune in each year between 2013 and 2015. CFP title games, comparatively, averaged 24.76 million since 2015.
“Basketball has been a consistent performer,” said Villanova AD Mark Jackson, who worked in football operations at USC and in the NFL. “It captures the nation’s attention on so many different fronts with the success of March Madness, and a completely different model where the accessibility of postseason success for so many different programs, it’s just a completely different algorithm.
“I get it, football is bigger. Everything is bigger — bigger revenue, bigger [attendance], bigger venues, all that kind of stuff — but I don’t know if I qualify it as more important than major college basketball. I look at them [as] kind of even keel.”
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The NCAA has generally moved at a glacial pace in responding to changes to the college sports landscape. Myriad lawsuits around the amateur model and lacking foresight throughout Mark Emmert’s presidential tenure have left the organization in a precarious spot with an enterprise that’s under siege.
New president Charlie Baker, to his credit, has made stark changes in the way the organization has approached the future. His recently proposed “Project DI” calls for the creation of an opt-in subdivision in which schools could more directly pay athletes through trust funds — a dramatic departure from the NCAA’s past views on athlete compensation.
Asked whether the creation of a new subdivision could affect the structure of the men’s basketball tournament, Baker noted he feels it could soldier on without cutting off smaller conferences that wouldn’t be able to afford the financial realities of his proposed new level.
“No one I’ve talked to has said to me, ‘Having a subdivision means you can’t have national championships,’” Baker said. “I’m working on that theory as long as that’s where everybody else is coming from.”
The men’s basketball tournament remains a key cog in the NCAA’s governance structure, overall revenue and ultimate power. The Associated Press reported last month that $945 million of the NCAA’s $1.28 billion in revenue came from media rights and marketing deals related to championships during the 2023 fiscal year. The NCAA’s deal with CBS and TNT Sports accounted for roughly $900 million of that mark, or nearly 69% of the organization’s total revenue.
Further, the NCAA has direct oversight for basketball and its revenue, whereas the CFP and high-major college football largely operate independently from the NCAA as it relates to the massive cash influxes associated with the sport’s postseason.
“People love the NCAA basketball tournament,” said San Diego State AD John David Wicker. “And the valuation and how it basically funds the overwhelming majority of what we do in the NCAA, that says that it’s still very important.”
Discussion around expansion of the men’s tournament has lingered in recent years. The field received a slight bump from 65 to 68 teams in 2011. That’s been followed with constant talk of creating more spots for at-large teams to better account for an enterprise that includes more than 350 schools at the Division I level. The Athletic reported last week that talks have centered on boosting the field to 72 or 76 teams. Baker told SBJ he hopes the bones of the tournament — such as automatic qualifiers — remain consistent, but there’s a discussion to be had about granting more access to the postseason.
“If we could do some things to modestly expand the tournament to address some of those issues, I don’t think that changes the magic of the tournament in any way,” Baker said. “But I do think it gives some schools an opportunity to get in who don’t get in now and who have a fairly legitimate case to be made that they deserve a shot.”
Where expansion could and would remain complicated is how the current media rights deal might account for added inventory. In theory, the NCAA wouldn’t want to add more games to its premier product for free, but CBS Sports and TNT Sports likely wouldn’t want to add to their ledgers, either. The NCAA, CBS and TNT each said they couldn’t comment about deal changes if there is expansion.
“You can’t just continue to use the same old model; the fundamentals are changing in terms of membership and how it’s constructed,” said Dan Gavitt, NCAA senior vice president of basketball. “That’s what I would say is important in this consideration around expansion. There has been a lot of change the last 10 years and even more so just the last few years, and that change is going to continue. … So how do we consider evolving the tournament so that it stays contemporary in the present tense and not in the past tense?”
March Madness has long felt like the preeminent palate cleanser for the craziness of the collegiate enterprise at large. Upsets. Brackets. Wild storylines. All of it has allowed basketball to reserve itself an entire month on the calendar.
For now, forget football and the chaotic scenarios floating around. It’s March.
