NCAA president Mark Emmert is grilled over gender inequity at the women’s Final Four

MINNEAPOLIS — A year ago at this time, NCAA president Mark Emmert was on the receiving end of a tidal wave of criticism over inequities in treatment for teams at the women’s and men’s basketball tournaments.

The governing body has done some things since then to improve the situation, from better amenities for women’s teams to overhauling its budgeting system and governing constitution. But the tide is still coming in, and it crashed ashore on Wednesday.

“None of us, of course, were happy at all with the outcomes of last year,” Emmert said at a news conference to begin the women’s Final Four’s festivities in the Twin Cities.

“We went through a great deal of hard work, first of all, understanding what transpired last year, and what the history has been,” he said, “and where we need to make appropriate investments in time and energy and money and people to make sure that the women who play basketball are provided with the same kind of experiences as the men are.”

Digging deep into the NCAA’s budgets is, as Emmert said, “not a very sexy topic” for people who are only casual fans of college sports. But they are a big deal for the NCAA’s critics.

“Creating a real-time budgeting model so you can track all the investments and compare and contrast everything line by line has been an integral part of this,” he said, “so that we know that where there are differences between the men’s and women’s events, for example, those are the result of conscious decisions rather than historical accident.”

» READ MORE: After social media shaming, NCAA tries to get gender equity right for 2022 March Madness

A key inflection point will come when the NCAA’s media rights deal with ESPN for a wide range of championships beyond men’s basketball expires in August 2024. That’s when outsiders and insiders alike hope to see how much broadcast revenue women’s sports can bring in on their own.

“It’s obviously in everyone in college sports’ best interests to maximize the revenue that you can produce from media contracts, while recognizing you want to balance that with making sure you get the right coverage too,” Emmert said. “We’re heading into just the right period to be looking at and determine the best approach going forward for a new contract. Whether that’s splitting up sports, whether that’s keeping some of it together, we’ll have to determine that — and we’ll have to work with outside experts, as we always do, who provide the necessary data and expertise in all of that.”

He made a point of praising ESPN for being “terrific partners in advancing women’s sports,” including putting some early-round women’s basketball tournament games on ABC this year and last year.

Everything from the Sweet 16 on remains only on cable, though, unlike the men’s tournament that has many games on CBS.

Asked if he was surprised by the scale of the backlash from women’s basketball fans, Emmert said he was not.

“Once you stopped and looked at it and looked at the data, we all understood it, none of us liked it,” he said. “We were all, I think, equally disturbed about it. … It was a great chance to say, ‘OK, look, we’ve got to redouble our efforts here: we’ve got to add personnel, we’ve got to add millions of dollars in support funding, we’ve got to do a whole variety of things differently.’ ”

He pronounced himself “surprised and pleased by how quickly everybody made that shift.”

“And the fact that there was continued debate and discussion — and there is even today, and there doubtlessly will be going forward — isn’t inherently a bad thing at all,” he added. “I think it’s perfectly fine for people to say, ‘Wait a minute, are you still being equitable here and fair here? What are the other areas in which you can and should be doing better?’ That’s pressure on all of us, but that’s not a bad thing.”

» READ MORE: Some suggestions for improving gender equity in college basketball | Mike Jensen

One of the big questions aimed at the NCAA recently has been whether an infusion of cash into women’s basketball will include the creation of win shares for teams in the national tournament. Whereas men’s programs can earn huge sums by being in the tournament and winning games, there are no such rewards for women’s teams.

Emmert said the NCAA has begun discussions about adding what he called “economic distributions around the tournament opportunities that student-athletes have, and whether or not it should look like the same thing on the men’s side.”

That was, to be sure, a long-winded way of saying it — something else the NCAA’s critics have long been used to.

“Whether or not the schools decide that they want to have some sort of distribution of revenue around women’s basketball, they’re going to have to determine what that might be,” Emmert continued. “And is that also distributing some of the revenue from the men’s basketball tournament, for example — which is enormously larger, right, almost eight to 10 times larger — or is it going to be some portions just out of revenue produced by the women’s tournament? What’s that ratio? What’s that model look like?”

Though discussions have only been “preliminary” so far, Emmert signaled that a change could happen before the next media deal begins.

“I would hope those are decisions that can be made within the next calendar year, for example,” he said. “If by this time next year there’s some notion of a direction to go in, that would be great. It doesn’t mean it can be implemented immediately, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t start that debate and that discussion.”

» READ MORE: How to watch the women's Final Four this weekend