equal opportunity exploitation is still exploitation
an eternal buzzkill tackles march madness
Today’s newsletter is via request from multiple readers! I wasn’t going to write about the women’s March Madness tournament because there’s already so much great content out there for you to read, but I aim to please so here we are. Scroll to the bottom for my prediction as to who is going to win it all.
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The NCAA women’s college basketball tournament—better known as March Madness—begins today. This is only the third year that the women’s tournament has even been allowed to use the March Madness branding and in just that short period of time, interest and hype has surpassed the men’s tournament. Even Shaq has said that he plans to only watch the women’s tournament this year (“Personally, I am not a fan of pitting the tournaments against each other in this way,”
wrote over at . “Success is not a zero-sum game, and you don’t need to put down the men’s game in order to exalt the women’s game.” I tend to agree with her, FWIW).There are predictions that the women’s championship will have more viewers than the men’s. The 2023-24 women's college basketball regular season saw a 37% year-over-year increase in viewership across ESPN platforms. A Seton Hall poll found Caitlin Clark is the best known college basketball player in the U.S., woman or man, by a 2-to-1 margin. In fact, 47% of the general population correctly identified her.
We are going to spend the next few weeks hearing about the stars of women’s college basketball, some of whom will go on to be the future of the WNBA. ESPN has a dedicated Clark reporter (something Clark didn’t ask for and likely doesn’t need, as my Hail Mary co-author Lyndsey D’Arcangelo noted on X/Twitter1). Clark is inarguably an incredible player who deserves all of the hype she is getting, but she’s also the next Great White Hope for women’s basketball and the upcoming WNBA draft, as Sabrina Ionescu was before her and as Paige Bueckers likely will be next season (a dynamic that goes back a long way, and that I explored more in-depth in this essay about Sue Bird’s public image).
Ticket prices for the women’s tournament are soaring, with Final Four tickets approaching $800 a piece—while the men’s Final Four tickets are averaging $250 each (it’s worth noting that the men play in a larger venue, which impacts how many seats are available). But let’s keep going. Women’s March Madness ads are sold out. Disney—the network that owns the rights to the women’s tournament—is projected to generate more than $25 million in ad sales revenue this year.
NIL deals for the players are surging, too: a recent SponsorUnited NIL report on the 2023-24 season details how women college athletes are dominating the NIL space, with a higher percentage of deals per athlete and increased social engagement compared to their male counterparts. Women athletes had 52% of NIL deals this season, compared to just 38% last year. College football overwhelmingly rules men’s NIL deals, but 2023-24 deals for women were spread evenly across sports, with WBB accounting for 35%—and seeing a 60% NIL deal increase year-over-year.
I’m thrilled for all the players who can finally capitalize on their own name, image, and likeness. College athletes deserve to be paid, and NIL deals are a positive step on that path. But when I watch college basketball, I can’t help but think of all the players that aren’t Caitlin Clark (who earns seven figures, all while she’s young enough that her mother still does her laundry for her) or Angel Reese or JuJu Watkins (Watkins’s Nerdwallet partnership has been called the “smartest NIL deal ever”).
“Tickets to the February game in which Clark set the all-time college women’s scoring record were, at about $400 on the secondary market, the most expensive in the history of women’s college basketball—until the game, two weeks later, in which she passed the men’s all-time scoring leader, when the average resale ticket went for $546,” according to The Atlantic.
Where does that money go? To the NCAA, which isn’t liable to Title IX regulations and has argued in court that it has “no legal duty to protect” players from sexual abuse or harassment, and which allows schools that discriminate against LGBTQ+ students to participate? To the schools, who may put money into facilities and hire elite coaching staff but the players themselves won’t see a dime (coaches are the primary beneficiaries of this revenue; and while it’s true that coaching salaries for women’s sports aren’t growing at a rate comparable to men’s salaries, the three highest paid coaches in college WBB—Kim Mulkey, Geno Auriemma, and Dawn Staley—all make over $3 million per year)?
For every player like Clark who is going to get millions of dollars in NIL deals and eventually a WNBA contract and professional sponsorships, there are 13 other players on the Iowa team who won’t. The WNBA is the hardest pro league in the world to make; with only 12 teams2 and 144 players, competition is brutal. Even getting drafted out of college doesn’t guarantee you’ll make the league—fewer than half of the 36 players drafted in 2023 made Opening Day rosters.
The women on these teams are bringing in viewership and revenue by the millions and most of them will graduate and never play another day of organized basketball. Some will leverage their time as a collegiate athlete into a related career path, or will enter the coaching pipeline. But most will have memories and memorabilia but not much else to show for their efforts.
“I don’t think that college sports would fall apart [if players were paid to play, but] there would be a big shift in the wealth of where money went within college sports,” one college athlete told Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva in The Daily Beast. “Right now it’s the administrators and coaches, but it would actually be a shift to the labor force… If you’re gonna generate revenue, I think part of that revenue should go to the labor force.”
As much as I love watching women athletes play incredible basketball on a massive national platform, as much as I love seeing people realize how fun women’s sports are and how much value women athletes have, my enjoyment of college WBB and the March Madness tournament is always a little colored by the fact that I am watching exploitation in real time. Increased opportunities for women in sports are amazing, but when it comes to college athletics, more opportunities for women just mean more opportunities for exploitation.
College athletes need to unionize, which is something we are seeing discussed more and more in mainstream conversations. “Unions of college athletes could become a legitimate source of cultural and political power that could rival that of almost any other group in many sports-crazy states, which are often the same states that have the worst, most right wing politics,” writes
. Dartmouth men’s basketball recently voted to unionize, making a larger movement a possibility.“All I’m getting at this point is a degree while all the coaches and the university is getting everything from me,” one player told Kalman-Lamb and Silva, while another pointed out that “the value I am bringing as a football player is worth way fucking more than college tuition and cutting me a check for rent.”
But women’s sports both need a union just as much—if not more so—than their male counterparts, and may be less likely to be ready to push for one. Women’s sports are just now becoming seen as moneymakers, are just now being deemed to have value. Women athletes, especially ones as young as those in college, may be hesitant to risk what they’ve just started to receive. They may worry that if they push, they’ll lose it all.
But as Nolan points out, college athletes “could become the ultimate craft unions: Small groups of highly skilled workers who are hard to replace and who can use their irreplaceability to cut themselves into the profits they produce in a major way.”
So I will cheer on these incredible players and enjoy watching high-level basketball. But I will also keep cheering for them to get the kind of rights and protections that they deserve. Here’s to a future where March Madness is full of women performing at the highest level of their sport—and free from the kind of exploitative environment it currently exemplifies. My hope is that they will use this increased visibility and earning power as leverage to shift the institutional power that drives college athletics—and that’s something worth rooting for.
Ok now: who do I have to win it all? South Carolina again, I think! Who do you have?
Lyndsey is an incredible women’s basketball journalist and I highly recommend following her work.
Expansion is coming: a Bay Area team will be joining the league in 2025, the first addition to the W since 2010.
This piece was better than whatever I had in mind. So good. I struggle to watch college sports generally but always find my way in during the tournies. And yes, I too have SC to win it all but all I really want is that Iowa LSU rematch and for Juju to show up and show out on the big stage. Thank you for writing this by request. So grateful.
I agree; it's sickening (derogatory) how exploited college athletes are. I really really really hope that SC is able to win it all and that the officiating of their games is fair (not anti-Black and misogynoirist) and that Holly Rowe is as uninvolved in everything as possible (I am also an eternal buzzkill, to some people)