HOUSTON — The Final Four has taken over Houston, where even the light rail trains are wrapped in the NASA-inspired logo, alongside the logo of one of the NCAA’s “corporate champions,” of course. It’s the same thing in Dallas, where all of the signage at both airports leaves no traveler unaware that the women are in town.
The Men’s Final Four — the additional branding introduced last year after 2021’s gender-equity debacle in the women’s San Antonio bubble — is the biggest event on the NCAA calendar, the conclusion of a tournament that is its biggest revenue engine, a celebration and convention as much as a championship.
The Women’s Final Four is catching up fast in terms of interest, if not yet financial reward. That’s now an untapped oil field of money ready to blow when the NCAA’s television deal covering most sports other than men’s basketball expires in 2024. That deal, signed in 2011, pays the NCAA only $34 million a year, pocket change in a billion-dollar industry. Women’s basketball has never been bigger, and the next television deal will reflect that.
