Another strong March Madness, won by UConn again, demonstrates basketball’s strength in the college market.getty images
Jim Phillips is calculated in his words. The ACC’s polished commissioner isn’t one to misspeak. He’s clear and resolute, with a tinge of Midwestern charm that endeared him to so many during his nearly 14 years as athletic director at Northwestern.
So when Phillips makes a point, it’s worth listening closely.
“From top to bottom, this league has been undervalued,” he said during the ACC’s basketball media days in Charlotte earlier this month. “But it remains clear that the competition within the ACC prepares our teams for postseason play.”
The “undervalued” notion Phillips evoked was a reference to the ACC landing just five teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament each of the past three years. The sentiment, however, carries weight in discussions throughout the industry on basketball’s value in an even more football-centric college sports ecosystem.
College football’s outsized effect on athletic department budgets and the industry at large has grown exponentially in the past decade-plus. Schools are raking in more cash than ever from the gridiron, but it leaves those leagues and schools with basketball aspirations wondering whether their sport might be able to draw more dollars in the media rights market.
“Outside of the NFL … if you look at what other content consistently falls within [the top broadcasts annually], it is college content — football, then the basketball side,” said William Mao, Octagon senior vice president of global media rights.
Industry standards suggest most college conference media rights packages derive around 80% of their value from football. Men’s basketball makes up the bulk of that remaining 20%, plus or minus a few percentage points (women’s basketball, for example, has had an increased impact in the past handful of years).
But as football continues to drive the reshaping of college sports via proposals of super leagues and the ever-present thought that the top level of the sport might secede from the current governance structure, where does that leave men’s basketball in the discussion?
“Americans love the sport of basketball. [We’re] unrivaled in the world in that regard,” Kansas AD Travis Goff said earlier this year. “But football just drives eyeballs, attention and fandom that is pretty unique. The proliferation of why football is the driver of change in college athletics is directly attributed to the resources, the dollars associated with it and the amount of eyeballs that it drives.”
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Kyle Smith cracked a smile, his tone starting to lean toward sarcasm. It’s been a whirlwind 18 months for the new Stanford men’s basketball coach. He watched the Pac-12 implode during his most successful run to date at Washington State. His athletic director, Pat Chun, then departed Pullman, Wash., for the greener pastures of Seattle and in-state rival Washington.
Amid all of that, Smith left to take over a Stanford job rife with inherent challenges even before a move to the basketball-crazy ACC.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Smith deadpanned about the football-related changes affecting college basketball. “I was saying it in Pullman, but no one could hear me. It’s like a tree falls in the forest [and no one could hear]. … It doesn’t make sense to me why football dictates everything.”
Basketball is a top league priority for Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark.getty images
College basketball remains in a complicated place. Schools are attempting to balance what’s been a cash cow for decades, with the continued billowing of football-related profits.
Take schools such as Indiana and Kansas. Both have long been men’s basketball bluebloods — albeit Kansas has been far more successful in the modern era — but each is attempting to resurrect previously struggling football programs.
Indiana started the 2024 season 6-0, thanks to new coach Curt Cignetti and a massive restructuring and reinvestment into the football program. Kansas, too, despite a 1-5 start this year, has seen its program return to respectability under Lance Leipold, and is in the midst of a massive mixed-use development project around David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium.
“It is interesting to try to balance, particularly schools [with basketball tradition],” Indiana AD Scott Dolson said. “When we looked at making [a coaching change in football], we looked at schools like North Carolina and Duke, Kansas and Kentucky, and tried to look at schools that have a strong basketball tradition and how you build your football program together with that. I’m convinced that there’s no question you can have both.”
College media rights deals have also grown in size and scope.
The Big Ten’s most recent deal with Fox, NBC and CBS will teeter over the $1 billion mark in annual average value. The SEC’s contracts with ESPN —which includes the SEC Network — are valued at more than $700 million per year. Yet those are leagues in which football, unquestionably, is king.
The Big East is perhaps the best case study for men’s basketball media value. The league, which boasts five of the past 10 men’s basketball national champions and doesn’t sponsor football, recently inked a six-year deal with Fox reportedly worth an estimated $75 million to $80 million annually.
That kind of value, for context, amounts to around a $6 million to $8 million distribution for each of the 11 member schools — a per-institution number that would put the Big East, in terms of media rights, directly between the American Athletic Conference and Mountain West, a pair of more football-thinking conferences, but far behind the Big Four leagues.
“Nobody tells your story better than a major national network,” Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman said. “We’re in good company, and we think the length of the deal sounded right to us as well. If the market gets reset before that by any other college conference, for example, I think we can be the beneficiary of that when our deal runs out.”
Ackerman told Sports Business Journal the league is also working to add a subpackage to supplement its media rights agreement that would include around 30 men’s games and 75 women’s games, although exact valuations on those contests are fluid.
Endeavor’s Karen Brodkin was in the midst of an early morning workout when her phone pinged earlier this month. Glancing away from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” she peered down to see a notification that former NBA star Carlos Boozer’s twin boys had committed to play basketball at Duke.
Brodkin, a self-described basketball junkie, is naturally plugged into the sport’s ecosystem. Such is required of her role as executive vice president at Endeavor, co-head of WME Sports and the myriad clients the firm represents — including five-star Rutgers guard Dylan Harper.
The sentiment the notification induced, though, was that basketball remains a pertinent and prolific part of the larger sports ecosystem, worthy of carrying significant value.
“I’m not going to say anything stupid and say the value of college basketball from a media perspective is the same as college football,” Brodkin quipped. “… But I do think that delta is getting tighter.”
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The Big East’s deal has been lauded as a win for the league and college basketball as a whole. Still, there’s a belief from those within the industry that feel the sport, to use the ACC’s Phillips’ word, remains “undervalued.”
Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark has been determined to create the best men’s basketball league in America. The Big 12 saw eight programs ranked inside the final Associated Press poll last year, while member institutions have won two of the past four national titles (Baylor in 2021 and Kansas in 2022). The league is also adding historic basketball power Arizona to the fold this year, after the latest swath of football-driven realignment.
Yormark’s belief in the basketball product and the Big 12’s recent success have the league thinking differently. The commissioner spearheaded the creation of a PSL program around the Big 12 men’s basketball championship that’s estimated to bring in around $30 million over eight years. The league also announced the hiring of WCC Commissioner Brian Thornton as its vice president of men’s basketball earlier this month.
Even the Big 12’s pursuit of UConn, which has since been put on hold, was centered on what the school’s men’s and women’s basketball programs — winners of 17 national titles combined — might bring in another round of media rights discussions.
“I feel that basketball is undervalued, and there will be some upside in that part of our business moving forward, both short term and long term,” Yormark said. “As I look at the next TV cycle, we have optionality when it comes to how we might go into the marketplace. The traditional way is you bundle it, but we might or might not do that. Time will tell. But at least we’re in a position where we can look at that next TV cycle in a traditional way, or, for that matter, not a traditional way. It’s great to have optionality.”
The Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and ACC each have basketball, for all intents and purposes, packaged as part of their larger deals with the networks. But, to Yormark’s point, some contend men’s basketball could add value by existing in its own deal.
That line of thinking isn’t without precedent, though whether it would actually bring increased revenue is up for debate. The ACC, for example, had separate deals for football (ESPN/ABC) and basketball (Raycom Sports) until 2010, when it packaged both sports in a 12-year, $1.86 billion contract with ESPN. Under the terms of its previous agreements, football netted the league $258 million over seven years, while basketball brought in $370 million over 10 years. Together, those deals accounted for around $75 million annually, while the succeeding ESPN contract that packaged both sports saw the yearly value jump to $155 million.
Facility notes
An $82 million renovation of Kentucky women’s basketball’s Memorial Coliseum recently wrapped up. At South Dakota State, a $53.1 million overhaul of First Bank & Trust Arena was completed for the home of both the men’s and women’s squads.
— SBJ Research
More recently, the NCAA considered splitting off women’s basketball as part of a new deal with ESPN. NCAA President Charlie Baker and those involved in the negotiations eventually decided to roll women’s basketball into a broader package that included a number of Olympic sports worth an average of $115 million annually. Women’s basketball accounted for around $65 million of that annual value (roughly 56% of the media rights portion of the deal).
“If your objective was singularly to abandon all else and only monetize one property, that’s a different factor,” Hillary Mandel, executive vice president, head of Americas, IMG, said, referring to why the NCAA chose not to package women’s basketball separately. “But if part of your objectives were to maximize one property and make sure you haven’t hurt anybody else, [that’s different].”
Men’s basketball remains a valuable enterprise, granted that shouldn’t be wholly surprising. March Madness is a ratings bonanza for CBS and Turner Sports channels during a time in the sports calendar when little else fills the void.
The Big East’s Val Ackerman finds basketball-driven success.getty images
It’s driven major advertising revenue for years, and even created a cottage industry in Las Vegas for those who make the annual pilgrimage to pick point spreads and watch postseason action from The Strip’s casinos.
Just last year, for example, brands earned $482 million in sponsorship exposure value from the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments, per Hive — an AI company that measures branding embedded in media.
“If you look at the last couple of games of the [College Football Playoffs] compared to the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament,” Octagon’s Mao said, “both of those usually fall within the top 100 broadcasts, if not top 150 broadcasts on an annual basis.”
CBS led the pack in men’s basketball viewership last year with an average of 1.32 million viewers, not including conference tournament games — a 5% increase from 2021-22. Fox, meanwhile, recorded the most-watched regular-season hoops contest, drawing a network-record 5.2 million viewers for Arizona-Michigan State on Thanksgiving.
The Big East Tournament, too, saw record numbers in viewership, averaging 454,000 viewers through its semifinal games — a 55% increase compared to the same point in the year prior. FS1 also notched its most-watched quarterfinals day to date during the event, thanks to Providence’s upset of Creighton that drew 417,000 viewers (the best Big East quarterfinal ever on FS1), while Marquette-Villanova finished closely behind at 384,000 viewers.
“I think there’s a story to be told, like for our program, it’s like a football program with how much we’re watched and the viewership — and that matters,” Duke head coach Jon Scheyer said. “I believe, in the long run, that will matter. But we have to continue to make sure our game is ready.”
