Women’s basketball revenues are closing in on the $1 billion mark according to the latest data from the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act. Women’s basketball revenues for the 2014-15 year were $806 million dollars. This represents 43% of the men’s basketball revenues from the same year of $1.87 billion. However, women’s basketball team revenues have increased 28% over a five-year period compared to 23% for the men.
Continuing on our March Madness theme from last week’s blog, we looked at individual institutions and conference revenue breakdowns. Whereas the men’s teams financially pretty much mirror what is going on the court, the women’s teams have a much more diverse revenue picture. Five of the top ten teams financially are in fact in the Sweet 16 (compared to six of the men). Top-ranked Stanford has nearly three times the revenue of second-ranked Baylor. Since I am married to a Baylor grad, I am going to scream foul on behalf of the Lady Bears.
What is more interesting is that six of the Sweet 16 fall out of the top 100 in revenue. I was shocked to find that a basketball powerhouse like University of Kentucky is ranked 390 out of 1,972 colleges. Mississippi State was the lowest financial performer of the Sweet 16 coming in at number 655. They were the poor team that had to face Connecticut in the Sweet 16 round and lose by 60 points.
Conference revenue among the women was much more balanced than the men. The top performing conferences all fare relatively equally. This is good news to conferences like the Horizon League which has over $11 million in revenue. As a Valparaiso grad, I am very proud of our men’s team in the semi-final of the NIT tournament.
We have also created a spreadsheet of all institutions and their men’s and women’s team basketball revenues for the past five years. We have also provided several pivot tables that rank teams and conferences by revenue product and growth rates. You can download the spreadsheet by clicking HERE.
