The TikTok That Changed College Hoops – The Journal. – WSJ Podcasts – The Wall Street Journal

University of Oregon forward Sedona Prince’s viral TikTok from the 2021 NCAA women’s tournament led to a gender-equity investigation in college basketball. WSJ reporter Rachel Bachman details how it also resulted in big changes in this year’s women’s championships.
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Ryan Knutson: If you're one of the millions of people who follow college sports, there's one phrase that's hard to avoid right now.
Male: March Madness.
Female: Ready for the magical madness of March. This has been March Madness for real now.
Male: That's why they call it March Madness.
Rachel Bachman: It really is one of the most recognizable phrases in sports. I think when you say March Madness to the average sports fan, they instantly know what you're talking about. You're talking about college basketball, brackets, and being glued to your TV for several weekends in a row.
Ryan Knutson: The that's our colleague Rachel Bachman. As the tournament enters the final four this weekend, the slogan is everywhere. But for decades, only the men's tournament used the phrase. And in recent years, when the women asked if they could use it.
Rachel Bachman: Generally, they were told that this brand was for the men's tournament. It wasn't for the women's.
Ryan Knutson: Hmm. Just that like March Madness is a man's thing?
Rachel Bachman: Essentially yes.
Ryan Knutson: But last year, a viral video sparked outrage and caused a reckoning at the NCAA. And now that is finally changing.
Rachel Bachman: This year at the women's tournament for the first time in its 40 year history, the women are also using the March Madness branding. Now when you turn on the men's tournament or the women's tournament, you can see that famous bracket logo that says March Madness and that's quite achievement.
Ryan Knutson: Welcome to The Journal. Our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Wednesday, March 30th. Coming up on the show, how one TikTok video ignited a new era of March Madness. The changes to the women's tournament this year started with Sedona Prince.
Rachel Bachman: Sedona prince is a six-foot-seven Oregon basketball player. She is named for Sedona, Arizona where her parents were married. She is very charismatic, which is one reason why I think she has three million followers on TikTok
Ryan Knutson: And her videos are pretty entertaining.
Sedona Prince: Okay, little tattoo to her. I got a bunch of new ones yesterday. What's up guys? This is the part two. I made toast. I'm going to eat it and kind of just tell you the story of how I broke my leg. You all want to know what it's like being six-foot-seven as a girl?
Ryan Knutson: Last year, she showed her followers something she found deeply unfair. It was March of 2021. Because of the pandemic, the men's and women's tournaments were taking place in bubbles. Sedona Prince, who was playing in the tournament, started to notice how differently the NCAA was running the women's operation compared to the men's. She decided to record a video.
Rachel Bachman: Oregon forward Sedona prince arrived at the tournament and noticed something that really bothered her.
Sedona Prince: I got something to show you all.
Rachel Bachman: She noticed that the weight room, the training area set up for women's players was remarkably small compared to the video she'd seen of the weight area at the men's tournament.
Sedona Prince: March Madness, the biggest tournament in college basketball for women. This is our weight room. Let me show you all the men's weight room.
Rachel Bachman: And in fact, the weight area for the women really looked like one you'd find at sort of a mid-priced hotel workout room. Whereas the men's tournament had a giant workout complex with many, many weight stands.
Sedona Prince: If you aren't upset about this problem, then you're a part of it.
Ryan Knutson: It wasn't even like an actual weight room. It was just like a stack of like five, 10s and 20 pound dumbbells.
Rachel Bachman: That's exactly right. It was sort of a depressing Charlie bound tree of hand weights and a few yoga mats.
Ryan Knutson: Prince shared the video on TikTok and Twitter and it exploded.
Male: The NCAA has come under fire for its facilities for women, after University of Oregon player Sedona Prince posted a video on social media.
Female: There's video that's now been viewed over 10 million times on Twitter.
Male: Dawn Staley, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, slammed the NCAA.
Female: Then, more big names, NBA Star Steph Curry, actress and Me Too advocate Alyssa Milano, and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. Wyden writing, "The inequality is shameful."
Ryan Knutson: News outlets and shows like Good Morning America started interviewing Prince.
Sedona Prince: But yeah, and then I posted it and it did some pretty cool stuff. It's cool.
Male: Yes. You could say that. It got quite a reaction.
Ryan Knutson: Rachel says it shook the world of college athletics.
Rachel Bachman: There's an idealism around college sports. Unlike pro sports, the NCAA is a nonprofit organization. Part of its mission is to give athletes opportunity and provide gender equity and so on. These contrasting conditions at the tournaments showed that it just was failing to do that.
Ryan Knutson: A day after Prince's video came out, the NCAA's senior vice president of basketball made a public statement. He blamed the discrepancies on the challenges of hosting a tournament in a bubble during a pandemic.
Male: What we normally pull together over months, and indeed years, we have tried to do in weeks and, in some cases, days, and that's meant some shortcomings. Again, for that, I apologize and feel terrible about anything that falls short of our lofty expectations.
Ryan Knutson: The NCAA ended up giving the women more equipment, but the video had already sparked a national discussion. Angry players and coaches started calling out other disparities in the bubble. For example, the women's tournament had fewer staff than the men's. And even the women's COVID tests were cheaper and less reliable.
Rachel Bachman: They saw that the men were getting cooler swag in their swag bags and some said they were getting better food. The comparisons just went on and on. Once you see that this thing and that thing are not equal, you wonder, well, how much else is unequal too? And you just sort of start finding things everywhere.
Ryan Knutson: The situation made Rachel start wondering about things outside the bubble, like why the phrase March Madness was always splashed on the men's courts, but not the women's, which either had school logos or just the words women's basketball. The answer Rachel found out was that at least once when the women asked if they could use the phrase, the NCAA told them no. What's sort of like the perception around why women's sports have been given fewer resources and attention?
Rachel Bachman: Well, I think historically there's a perception that maybe people don't care as much about women's sports, that there's not as much public interest, and that therefore it's the market speaking that not as many people want to watch women's sports. And so therefore, they don't make as much money, and therefore they don't get as much investment and consideration, and so on.
Ryan Knutson: In the wake of all the scrutiny, the NCAA released a budget summary that showed that while the men's tournament brought in money in the 2018-2019 season, the women's tournament lost money.
Rachel Bachman: It concluded that after the expenses were accounted for, the total net income for men's basketball was $864.6 million while women's basketball lost $2.8 million. It concluded this is the largest loss of any NCAA championship.
Ryan Knutson: But the same day the NCAA revealed its budget details, it also hired a law firm to investigate its gender equity concern. And that summer, lawyers at the firm released a big report.
Rachel Bachman: The report was very comprehensive. It was almost 200 pages long. What that report found when it was released months later really cast the NCAA's characterization of the women's tournament as a money loser in a very different light.
Ryan Knutson: The report's findings and its repercussions, that's after the break. To address its alleged shortcomings on gender equity, the NCAA hired an outside law firm to investigate how the organization was treating men versus women.
Rachel Bachman: It pledged to look at these issues very closely and, in fact, promised to release the findings of this report without any censorship or editing. It hired this firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink, to do the review.
Ryan Knutson: The lawyers investigated and published their findings.
Rachel Bachman: The Kaplan report, which was released last August, was the most comprehensive comparison ever of these two basketball championships that the NCAA operates and the findings were stark.
Ryan Knutson: The very first line of the report credited Sedona Prince's video as a "shot heard around the world" and said it drew attention to a long history of disparities between men and women. One of the biggest things the report found was that the NCAA wasn't making as much money as it could be on broadcast rights for the women's tournament, things like TV and radio deals.
Rachel Bachman: The NCAA produces 90 championships each year in dozens of sports, and one of its goals is to promote those sports and get exposure for them. It sold the broadcast rights of the men's basketball tournament for a huge sum because it's very popular. It sells the broadcast rights for the men's tournament for an average of a billion dollars a year to CBS Turner in a joint agreement. It lumps all the other new championships, 29 of them, including women's basketball, into a bundle and sells those broadcast rights to ESPN.
Ryan Knutson: That bundle of 29 sports championships and the women's tournament was being sold to ESPN for just $34 million. The law firm thought this was way too low.
Rachel Bachman: The Kaplan report estimated that the women's tournament, if it were offered up for sale as its own broadcast, could generate $81 million to $112 million per year on its own.
Ryan Knutson: No kidding! Almost at least three times as much money.
Rachel Bachman: Three times as much money as the NCAA was getting for 29 sports it could get for just women's basketball.
Ryan Knutson: Basically the Kaplan report concluded that the NCAA was ignoring a revenue engine that was right under its nose.
Rachel Bachman: I'll read to you really the money quote from this whole extensive report. The NCAA's broadcast agreements, corporate sponsorship contracts, distribution of revenue, organizational structure and culture all prioritize Division 1 men's basketball over everything else in ways that create, normalize, and perpetuate gender inequities. The report concluded that these results had been cumulative and that they had limited the growth of women's basketball and perpetuated a mistaken narrative that women's basketball is destined to be a money loser year after year.
Ryan Knutson: One of the things that's surprising to me is that it seems like a lot of people operate under the assumption that everybody just tries to make as much money as they possibly can always. Why wasn't the NCAA doing these things that the Kaplan report suggests they could do to make more money?
Rachel Bachman: The women's basketball tournament has really been told for years in so many words that it's a money loser, and it's really been seen as kind of a cause or a charity. But the Kaplan review really showed how much money, millions of dollars in untapped value, that the NCAA might have left on the table. It really has shifted the narrative.
Ryan Knutson: Rachel says the problem was that as a nonprofit, the NCAA tended to focus on the longer term stable contracts it had in the men's tournament. The men's program was like a well-established company, one that could churn out revenue without much thought.
Rachel Bachman: It was really like a blue chip stock for the NCAA. It produced a very reliable return. It knew it wasn't going to lose any money on it. It was going to make a lot of money and that would help it run the whole NCAA operation. But what happened was, especially as broadcast rights for sports have surged in value, is that there's a handful of growth stocks, startups if you will, and the biggest one was women's basketball, the women's basketball tournament, and yet the NCAA really was not giving it a platform for it to grow.
Ryan Knutson: In response to the findings in this report, the NCAA decided to make a bunch of changes to make men's and women's sports more equitable.
Rachel Bachman: It significantly increased the women's tournament budge. It hasn't said by how much, but my understanding it's by at least several million dollars. It added more staff to run the tournament. It expanded the women's tournament, so it now mirrors the men's tournament. That's 68 teams each. It, of course, allowed the women to use the March Madness branding, which branding experts say is very valuable. Significantly, NCAA officials have said publicly that when the broadcasts rights for the women's tournament and all those other sports come up after the 2024 women's tournament, they will consider selling them on the open market or offering them up for sale as a separate broadcast.
Ryan Knutson: The other day, Rachel called up Sedona Prince and asked her to reflect on everything that's happened. Prince said the whole shakeup felt surreal when she read the report last year and saw that the first sentence mentioned her video, she told Rachel that she couldn't help but laugh.
Sedona Prince: I had read it and I was like, oh my goodness, that's so funny that… I don't know, this kid makes TikTok and now there's this massive investigation. It was pretty cool. I think it just kind of is testament to like showing how much power these student athletes have if they use their voices like, "Hey, We were right." Now they're making changes for next year, for this year coming up, which is pretty cool. We got a list of all the changes today and the updates of what this year is going to be like compared to last year and making it much more equal, which is really nice.
Ryan Knutson: The Kaplan report recommended dozens of changes, but not all of them got implemented. For example, at the moment, it's hard for businesses to sponsor the women's tournament, unless they've already paid to sponsor the men's. Rachel says the NCAA could still try to change that. But the organization told her that they aren't "speculating on any potential changes at this time." The other day, Sedona Prince posted another video. This time it was more celebratory.
Sedona Prince: The first time the women's tournament has ever been branded as March Madness. Let's go, baby. We won. We won.
Ryan Knutson: But for Rachel, the biggest change so far might be one of perspective.
Rachel Bachman: I find myself thinking about how women's sports have been treated as a cause, like as something to sort of do because you have to do. But I think we should really look at it from the opposite perspective of, look, this is a real potential for revenue growth. And if you invest in it properly, not just because that's the right thing to do, but because it could actually make you money, then it might do just that.
Ryan Knutson: How much credit you think Sedona Prince deserves for that video that she posted for all the changes that we're seeing now?
Rachel Bachman: I think that video jump-started the outrage and put the onus on the NCAA and started in motion everything that followed. It's hard to overstate how important that video was.
Ryan Knutson: That's all for today, Wednesday, March 30th, The Journal is a co-production of Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal. If you like the show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
Kate Linebaugh is the co-host of The Journal. She has worked at The Wall Street Journal for 15 years, most recently as the deputy U.S. news coverage chief. Kate started at the Journal in Hong Kong, stopping in Detroit and coming to New York in 2011. As a reporter, she covered everything from post-9/11 Afghanistan to the 2004 Asian tsunami, from Toyota’s sudden acceleration recall to General Electric. She holds a bachelor degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and went back to campus in 2007 for a Knight-Wallace fellowship.
Ryan Knutson is the co-host of The Journal. Previously, he spent more than four years in the newsroom covering the wireless industry, and was responsible for a string of scoops including Verizon’s $130 billion buyout of Vodafone’s stake in their joint venture, Sprint and T-Mobile’s never ending courtship and a hack of the 911 emergency system that spread virally on Twitter. He was also a regular author of A-heds, including one about millennials discovering TV antennas. Previously, he reported for ProPublica, PBS Frontline and OPB, the NPR affiliate station in Portland, Ore. He grew up in Beaverton, Ore. and graduated from the University of Oregon.

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