The NCAA is standing pat with media rights for the majority of its championship events, including women’s basketball.
ESPN and the NCAA have reached a new, eight-year media rights extension covering the bulk of the NCAA championship events, including the Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament, it was announced Thursday. There had been considerable speculation that the NCAA would sell rights to the women’s tournament separately due to the recent growth in viewership for that event.
Per Sports Business Journal, NCAA president Charlie Baker says the deal is worth $115 million/year, nearly triple the current level of $40 million. Baker told SBJ that the NCAA valued the women’s basketball tournament at $65 million/year.
Under the deal, ESPN will keep rights to all of the NCAA events it currently airs and add the tennis and men’s gymnastics championships, Division II and Division III basketball and women’s volleyball, and exclusive rights to the NIT and WBIT basketball tournaments.
Notably, the new deal stipulates that the national championships of women’s basketball, volleyball, gymnastics and FCS football will air on ABC each season, and that the broadcast network will carry some coverage of the softball and baseball tournaments. ABC already carried all of those events, save for baseball.
In addition, ESPN is required to carry at least ten NCAA selection shows on its linear networks. It already airs the selection shows of women’s basketball, women’s volleyball, baseball and softball.
(News from ESPN PR, SBJ 1.4)
