For more than 20 years, fans of college sports like softball, baseball, women’s basketball and more than two dozen others have known just where to find N.C.A.A. championships — on ESPN’s spectrum of channels.
The arrangement has worked well for both parties: The N.C.A.A. ensured that its top athletes would perform on a national stage, and ESPN added hundreds of hours of live programming to a college sports portfolio that is anchored by college football and men’s basketball games.
A sign of how comfortable the N.C.A.A. and ESPN were with their partnership came in 2011, when they agreed to a 13-year, $500 million renewal without the N.C.A.A.’s ever taking the rights to market.
Now, though, with that deal set to expire in a year, it is increasingly likely that the next media rights deal for those 31 championships will look much different from the current one, which has been widely criticized as undervalued — particularly for its marquee event, the Division I women’s basketball tournament.
Addressing the upcoming negotiations, Charlie Baker, who took office as the new N.C.A.A. president in March, pointedly acknowledged last week at a symposium on college sports that “we dramatically underperform across a whole bunch of other revenue-raising opportunities.”
The…
