Units are coming to women’s NCAA Tournament: What are they and what coaches think about them

Men’s college basketball teams have received payouts for appearing in and playing in the NCAA Tournament since 1991. Now, the money is coming to the women’s game.

Charlie Baker publicly set an expectation last year standing in the media workroom in Cleveland, Ohio’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. Moments before tip-off in the national championship game for Division I women’s college basketball between South Carolina and Iowa – a game that would shatter viewership records for the sport – the president of the NCAA told reporters that he wanted to see units awarded for the women’s tournament in the next fiscal year.

“I can’t imagine getting it done with the distributed decision-making process we have at the NCAA any faster,” Baker said. “And I think it will be the start of what ought to be a terrific remunerative benefit for teams that make the tournament and do well.”

To Baker’s credit, he met his goal.

In January, the NCAA Division I membership voted unanimously — 292-0 — to create a unit payout system for teams that participate, and win, in the women’s NCAA Division I basketball tournament. Put more simply, each of the 68 teams that play in this year’s March Madness, for the first time ever in the women’s game, will receive a cut of the money the NCAA makes off it. The more a team wins, the more it can earn.

A day after the NCAA announced its historic Women’s Basketball Performance fund, Duke coach Kara Lawson was asked about the introduction of units into the women’s game and what her former coach would’ve thought about it. While playing for the late, great Pat Summitt in the early 2000s, Lawson helped the Tennessee Lady Vols make three Final Fours. She is about to coach in her third NCAA Tournament with Duke next week, fresh off winning an ACC Tournament title.

“I think Coach Summit would’ve thought, ‘It’s about time.’ That’s probably what she would’ve said. It’s about time that everybody is starting to catch up to how great a sport this is, how many great programs we have, coaching figures and players,” Lawson said. “I think that’s what she would’ve said, short and succinct: ‘What took y’all so long?’”

While the move by the NCAA was widely celebrated across the sport, there are many coaches who echoed the sentiment that Lawson expressed on Summitt’s behalf.

The men’s basketball tournament started paying out units in 1991. Why did it take 34 years longer for the women’s game to get the same sort of financial investment?

“It’s progress… I think the frustrating thing for me – because I’ve been in the game for a while – is that we’re just now getting there for women. That should have happened a long time ago,” Georgia Tech coach Nell Fortner told SB Nation. “We’ve been held back, you know? And it’s like, why would we do that? Why did that happen to us? This should have happened a long time ago, when the women’s basketball Final Four started selling out. I mean, come on.”

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Units finally arriving to the sport is the culmination of years of pressure from the loudest voices in women’s basketball – from coaches to administrators – pressuring the NCAA for a prize money payout system for the sport’s biggest event. The perfect storm to pave the way for it took place over the past few years.

The month that Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, succeeded Mark Emmert as NCAA president was March 2023. That was the beginning of a memorable NCAA Tournament that ended with Caitlin Clark’s Iowa meeting Angel Reese’s LSU in Dallas in the national championship, smashing ratings records with a viewership of 12.3 million.

Several months later, in January 2024, the NCAA signed a new media rights deal with ESPN and Disney for its 40 Division I national championships outside of FBS football and men’s basketball. While all the sports were lumped together, it valued women’s basketball at $65 million annually – or about 57 percent of the total $920 million deal across eight years.

But many coaches wanted to see women’s basketball spun off onto its own separate media rights deal. The 2021 Kaplan Report recommended that the women’s basketball tournament be unbundled from this championship rights package with ESPN. The report also suggested that, if its media rights were sold separately – like football and men’s basketball – that the women’s basketball tournament could be worth between $81 and $112 million annually.

Instead of breaking women’s basketball away from the rest of the championships and truly taking it to market for its own separate deal, the NCAA essentially used women’s basketball as leverage – or a tax – to get more money from ESPN and Disney for the entire package. Simply put: It used women’s basketball to prop up its unprofitable sports.

Fortner, 66, who has an Olympic gold medal and 15 seasons as a college head coach under her belt, figured the logical move was to separate women’s basketball from the rest of the championships.

“I thought that was going to happen, and it was a little bit disappointing to see that it didn’t. And I’m surprised that it didn’t, that we weren’t standalone,” Fortner said. “At least it’s more than it was. We’ll continue to prove ourselves, and that seems to be what we have to constantly be doing, and I think we constantly do it.”

The television contract keeps the women’s Division I NCAA Tournament on ESPN platforms for the next eight years. Perhaps the next time the deal is up, the NCAA will spin off its women’s basketball tournament as a separate property and take it to the open market to determine its true value.

Until then, the sport can celebrate units finally arriving. Courtney Banghart, the president of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association and head coach at North Carolina, sees this moment as a real milestone.

“It’s critical. Like, you want to talk about value in women’s basketball, then put some money on postseason success, right? And the fact that Charlie Baker took the gig and immediately made that happen is a big deal,” Banghart said. “I’m just glad for progress. And the progress is, we have units. And the progress is that women’s basketball is being discussed in House settlement. That’s progress.”

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As the president of the WBCA, Banghart has been in the company of Baker a few times since his tenure as NCAA president began. She felt like her position in the WBCA gave her a microphone and a platform to advocate for the future of the sport.

“I just made sure that every time I was in a room with Charlie Baker, every time I was in a room with the NCAA, I just said units, over and over and over again. Competitive units, financial incentives – over and over,” Banghart told SB Nation. “I think when you keep hearing the same thing over and over again from someone who’s been selected to lead the voice, you know, it’s critical that I’m saying it in every room I’m in.”

You might be wondering, what exactly is a unit, anyway?

Each year, the NCAA pays conferences in the men’s basketball tournament based on how many teams it has in the field and how many wins it accumulates. So, for example, a low mid-major like the MEAC is guaranteed one unit for simply having a team appear in the tournament as an automatic qualifier. Further units – more often to teams from power conferences – are rewarded for additional at-large bids and games-played. In 2022, a men’s basketball unit was worth $338,887. That season, the ACC had five teams in the tournament and those teams collectively won 13 games. So, the ACC was awarded 18 units, which will be paid out annually over the next six years for a grand total of about $36.6 million. In most conferences, that money is typically split evenly among the teams, while some schools who earn the unit might receive bonuses.

For women’s basketball, the flow of money will begin with this year’s tournament, with payouts – from a pool of $15 million – going out in the 2025-26 fiscal year. That figure will increase to $25 million in the 2027-28 season. The funds will then grow at about 2.9 percent per year, the same rate as all other Division I funds.

“I think continuing to capitalize on the momentum that our sport has gained the last, you know, 12 to 24 months really, it’s positive. And then, continuing to reinvest in the sport, and continuing to show that, not only is it a revenue-producing sport, it’s one that can continue to grow,” Lawson said. “So, the way I look at units is like reinvestment back into the game. And hopefully there’s many other things on the horizon for the sport.”

For coaches like Lawson, Banghart and Fortner, a bit more is at stake because of the performance success initiatives set up by the ACC, which rewards schools for winning in the postseason in football and men’s and women’s basketball.

“Credit to our membership… They got ahead of this and designed the mechanics that in the event the NCAA starts to have payouts for women’s basketball, the ACC would be in position to take advantage of that in this year,” ACC Deputy Commissioner Ben Tario recently explained to Duke radio host Chris Edwards. “Financial rewards will come not only to the conference, but to the institutions.”

Tario added: “That unit has a financial value, some of which will go into a conference pot, some of which will go to the institution that earns it.”

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In short, how the units are divided and spent will not be created equal conference to conference. The value of the unit won’t change, but a team in the ACC might earn more of it — because of the league’s performance incentives — than teams in other conferences.

“It’s pretty neat to know that, like we have in men’s basketball, the better your team does, the more your school is going to be rewarded financially,” N.C. State coach Wes Moore said. “I guess that puts more pressure on coaches, right? You got to deliver. But I think it’s really cool and it says a lot about how far our game has come and the talent level that has made it one of the top entertainment values out there.”

For many coaches at schools across the country, the hope is that the introduction of unit payouts will incentivize athletic departments and boosters to invest more in women’s basketball.

What’s that old saying? You got to spend money to make money?

“It’s only going to enhance our world, where college athletics is changing. To get more resources pumped directly into women’s basketball is critical,” Virginia Tech coach Megan Duffy said. “In a good way, it puts more pressure on our shoulders to produce. We got to get great teams and a great product on that floor to hold up our end of the bargain.”

Stanford coach Kate Paye added: “The opportunity to earn units – and hopefully more investment and transformational change is coming. People are excited about women’s basketball. You see the investment at the collegiate level, the professional level. It’s just going to continue to grow.”