A Look at March Madness Discrepancies

March Madness is a spectacle every year—people from all different levels of sports knowledge come together to fill out brackets and care intensely about college basketball for a few weeks. This year, the tournaments are being held in anti-COVID-19 bubbles, with the Men’s tournament taking place in Indianapolis and the Women’s tournament in San Antonio. As much as the NCAA prepared to counteract the pandemic however, they couldn’t stop evidence of their own unequal treatment of the Women’s tournament from going viral.

If the above images of two weight rooms don’t seem comparable to you, it’s probably because they aren’t comparable. This initial “weight room” provided to the women’s basketball teams isn’t a weight room at all—it looks like something you’d find tucked away in a corner of your local YMCA. Combined with allegations of lower quality meals and lesser value “swag bags” given to competitors, first impressions of the two bubbles painted a picture of a discrepancy between the time, effort, and money put into the men’s and women’s tournaments.

Social media proved essential in unveiling these discrepancies. University of Oregon forward Sedona Prince posted a video comparing the weight rooms on multiple social media accounts, and other prominent athletic figures such as Stephen Curry and Billie Jean King commented on the situation and helped outrage about it spread across the internet. Luckily enough, said outrage seems to have paid off in this instance—overnight, the NCAA upgraded the women’s weight room for the 1st and 2nd round teams to use, establishing the facility pictured below:

So, in this case, the court of public opinion seems to have come through. But how did this happen in the first case, and what kinds of regulations can prevent it from happening again in the future?

Firstly, I want to talk about the sports revenue argument which I discussed more in depth in my last post. The NCAA receives funding from member colleges and universities across the country in order to stage national athletic competitions. Thus, the argument that men’s sports often generate more revenue than women’s sports holds little to no weight, especially compared to its application in professional sports (which, if you read my last blog, I still find debatable). The NCAA is an athletic conference intended to host entertaining, educational athletic competitions across the nation, and to put less effort into an entire class of sports based on sex is morally wrong. These are not professional athletes that the NCAA is dealing with, but college students. Without even getting started on the controversy over whether or not college athletes should be paid, the NCAA at least owes its various athletes of the same sport a level playing field, regardless of their sex, gender, or any other factor. We are talking about a men’s basketball tournament and a women’s basketball tournament here—same sport, same athletic conference, same number of teams participating, same time of year. You would be hard pressed to find a more equal comparison than that.

When I first heard about this story, I wondered if Title IX would come into play. After all, the legislation barring educational discrimination on the basis of sex is famously applied to high school and college-level sports as one of its most high profile uses. Unfortunately, Title IX cannot help us in the case of the NCAA due to the Supreme Court ruling NCAA v. Smith (1999). In this ruling several decades ago, the Supreme Court determined that the NCAA does not fall under Title IX. This was an unanimous (9-0) ruling, and the majority opinion was given by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, herself a notable proponent of equality of the sexes. Ginsburg wrote: “[e]ntities that receive federal assistance, whether directly or through an intermediary, are recipients within the meaning of Title IX”, defining any educational entity that received federal grants of any sort as having to obey Title IX within their institution. While the NCAA receives funding from colleges and universities which in turn receive federal funding, Ginsburg distinguished it, writing, “entities that only benefit economically from federal assistance are not [recipients within the meaning of Title IX]”. With a lack of direct funding, the Court held that the NCAA has no obligation to obey Title IX within its operations. Whether or not you agree with that legal ruling, it seems pretty entrenched with its unanimous status from just several decades ago, so equality advocates should probably look elsewhere when it comes to holding the NCAA accountable.

In the short term, the court of public opinion seems to have worked effectively. The immediacy with which the NCAA was spurred to action thanks to viral posts and media coverage of the issue proved potent in solving the issue. Is relying on such a case-by-case solution viable? On the one hand, the power of social media is always growing. Students’ increased ability to broadly report and publicize whatever they see around them in an incredibly short period of time is a potent one, and certainly in this case it yielded results extraordinarily quickly. There are some problems with relying solely on this strategy however. Firstly, social media is imprecise, and simply trying to procure immediate public outrage at a perceived slight can be a dangerous precedent to set. It also may not be an effective strategy in all cases; after all, March Madness is a hugely popular event every year, with millions of fans observing and more media coverage than most sporting events can boast. Would social media outrage spurring a company or conference into action work on a lesser publicized event? To ensure equitable treatment of student athletes in the future, advocates may want to consider promoting legislation to complement and/or expand the reaches of Title IX. That kind of more permanent change could help prevent inequalities big and small from marring the athletic world in the first place.