It was an iconic moment. Tiffany Hayes from the championship podium after her Golden State Valkyries won the WNBA championship in just their second season of existence, soaking in the cheers from the sellout crowd at Ballhalla.
“Invest in women’s sports baby, let’s go!” Hayes said.
Hard to argue with the evidence.
The Golden State Valkyries are worth an estimated $1 billion by CNBC and $850 million by Sportico, both astonishing valuations given the $50 million expansion fee to enter the league in 2023. That growth is directly related to owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber's investment in the team. They took over the 18,000-seat Chase Center, aka Ballhalla, converted the Warriors’ former practice facility, and are literally showing up to games. The strategy communicates value, and the fans rewarded the team with sellout after sellout. They became the first women’s professional franchise to earn $100 million in annual revenue.
So let’s talk about the term “non-revenue generating” and how it is applied to women’s college sports.
The NCAA barred women’s college basketball from using the term March Madness, the NCAA’s trademarked phrase, until 2022. This was after a landmark 2021 gender equity report from Kaplan, Hecker & Fink found significant disparities in the way the NCAA treated the men’s and women’s games.
The report found the NCAA had been losing millions in potential revenue by bundling women’s basketball broadcast rights with other sports. While noting that the NCAA maximizes broadcast revenue with about $1 billion for the men’s tournament, the women’s tournament was potentially missing out on millions, and a media analyst set the value at a projected $80 to $120 million for the 2025 season.
The men's tournament has long generated lucrative performance payments for conferences based on how their teams advance through the bracket. Until the 2025 tournament, there was no comparable system for women's basketball.
And know where the men’s money comes from? The broadcast deal.
And the 2024 NCAA women’s final — Iowa vs. South Carolina in Caitlin Clark’s senior year — got a higher television rating (18.9 million viewers) than the men’s final that season (UConn vs. Purdue at 14.8 million) and the average of the 2023 NBA Finals. While the men’s conferences got paid that year, the women’s didn’t.
No money in, no money out.
That's worth remembering as Congress considers the Protect College Sports Act which promises to preserve “women's and Olympic sports.” The bill defines a non-revenue program as one whose attributable revenue is less than its direct and allocated operating expenses.
On paper, that might seem straightforward.
However, for years women’s basketball was denied some of the very mechanisms that generate revenue. Its championship wasn't marketed under the NCAA's most valuable basketball brand. Its television rights weren't sold independently. Tournament success didn't produce performance payouts to conferences. The bill codifies that way of thinking. What a spectacular lack of imagination in the current moment.
Women’s basketball is one of the fastest-growing sports, period. There are sellouts at the college level, in the WNBA, and the offseason Unrivaled has been crushing it as an upstart. And if this is the case for women’s basketball, what other sports haven’t been appropriately invested in? Lacrosse, volleyball, soccer, softball, the list goes on.
The Valkyries give us a billion reasons to reconsider.
