South Carolina women's basketball: A week that will change women's basketball forever

This past week, women’s college basketball experienced not just one but two events that will permanently change the landscape of the sport. On Wednesday, the NCAA approved units for the women’s NCAA Tournament, and on Thursday, the Department of Education ruled that revenue sharing with college athletes must comply with Title IX.

What are these two decisions, and how do they impact women’s basketball?

Units

Let’s start with the easy one.

The plan to implement units was announced last August, but it was not approved until Jan. 15.

Coaches have been asking for units for years. Previously, a men’s team earned money for simply appearing in the tournament, while women’s programs earned nothing, even if they won the championship.

In the wake of the scathing Kaplan report about the NCAA’s inequitable treatment of women’s basketball, the NCAA took several steps toward equality. 

It allowed the women’s tournament to use “March Madness” branding and expanded the tournament field to 68 teams, matching the men’s tournament. But the changes didn’t include what coaches wanted most – units.

As interest in the tournament surged, climaxing when last season’s South Carolina-Iowa championship game drew higher ratings than the men’s game, irritated coaches again wanted to know when their programs would get a piece of the pie. The NCAA and ESPN reached a new rights agreement for the tournament worth about $65 million annually. 

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It was a huge jump in revenue, although many still thought it was undervalued. Most importantly, it permanently ended the argument that the women’s tournaments weren’t making money.

Units are a little-known part of the NCAA men’s tournament. Teams earn a “unit” for each game that they play in the tournament (except the national championship game). Each unit is worth a certain dollar figure (it goes up each year, and was $2 million last year). That dollar figure is paid out over six years, and each conference distributes shares of the fund to its member schools.

It is important revenue for power conference programs and absolutely essential for small schools, who could see their operating budget nearly double with one tournament upset.

Units for women’s basketball won’t be worth as much as men’s basketball. The fund that pays out units will start at $15 million for 2025-26 and rise by $5 million for the next two years until it pays $25 million for 2027-28. After that, it will rise at about 2.9% per year.

A championship run like South Carolina’s would earn about $1.3 million next year.

Revenue Sharing

Revenue sharing is the veiled way the NCAA is referring to paying players. 

To recap, the House settlement paved the way for colleges to start paying players directly. The settlement included an annual “salary cap” of $20.5 million. The settlement did not include how schools should distribute that money.

Would football players get most or all of it? Would men’s basketball get the rest? Women’s sports programs were worried they might get shut out. 

On Thursday, the Department of Education issued a memo stating that revenue sharing is a form of “athletic financial assistance” and, therefore, subject to Title IX laws. 

Those laws are familiar to most as the requirement that athletic departments offer the same athletic scholarships to men and women in proportion to the gender makeup of the overall student body.

TLDR: On Thursday, the Department of Education said that schools have to offer equal payments to male and female athletes.

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That’s big for women’s sports like basketball, softball, and volleyball, which have large fan bases. It guarantees they will continue to be funded and at a level that will probably create even more interest.

Now for the huge asterisk: We still don’t actually know what these payments will look like, and there are already lawsuits challenging the implementation. There will certainly be more. 

But this is encouraging for women’s basketball coaches and players.

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