Iowa’s NCAA financial filing shows booming women’s basketball revenue in Caitlin Clark’s final season

IOWA CITY — Iowa women’s basketball’s special 2023-24 season — one that ended with a second consecutive trip to the national championship game — had a special impact on Iowa’s checkbook, too.

Iowa women’s basketball ticket revenue more than doubled from $1.4 million in 2022-23 to $3.3 million to 2023-24, according to Iowa’s NCAA financial filing obtained by The Gazette via an open records request. That figure exceeds the 2023-24 men’s basketball ticket revenue (just under $3 million) and far exceeds women’s basketball total revenue from a mere two years earlier ($1.7 million).

The dramatic increase happened as the Hawkeyes sold out season tickets for the first time in program history and had to stop accepting new season ticket deposits more than six months before the start of the season. Before the 2023-24 season, Iowa had only sold out three regular-season games in program history.

Those figures include revenue from hosting the first two rounds of March Madness as one of the top 16 overall seeds. It also includes the preseason Crossover at Kinnick exhibition against DePaul, which drew a record-breaking crowd of 55,646.

“That was an outside event where we had extra revenue that we wouldn’t have normally had in other seasons,” said Greg Davies, the athletic department’s chief financial officer.

Program, novelty, parking and concession sales also jumped from $430,418 to $858,548 — a 99.5 percent increase. Iowa women’s basketball saw more modest increases in areas such as sponsorships, sports camps and contributions.

That led to an overall spike in total operating revenue from $3.8 million in 2022-23 to $6.5 million in 2023-24 — a 70.4 percent increase. But that does not entirely encapsulate how much value the program brought for the University of Iowa and Big Ten Conference as a whole.

The NCAA filing attributes only $112,500 of the $52.4 million in media rights revenue to women’s basketball — a fraction of 1 percent. That calculation is puzzling considering how much value the Caitlin Clark-led Hawkeyes brought to the Big Ten’s TV partners.

Iowa’s regular-season finale against Ohio State, for example, averaged 3.39 million viewers — the most-watched regular season women’s college basketball game on any network since 1999. It even outperformed all but two of Iowa football’s games in 2024, according to figures gathered by Sports Media Watch.

“The media rights is an estimate that we have from some of our partners,” Davies said of the small portion of income attributed to women’s basketball. “So we try to allocate that based on what has historically driven. … It may not just be for Iowa when they’re looking at this stuff. It’s an overall estimate of the conference.”

Women’s basketball revenue will soon increase across the board after the NCAA signed a much more lucrative TV deal with ESPN for, among other things, the women’s basketball tournament. Conferences will receive the revenue based on their teams’ postseason success — a similar model as what has been used in men’s basketball.

Iowa men’s basketball sees drop in ticket revenue, but remains profitable

While Iowa women’s basketball ticket revenue has skyrocketed, men’s basketball ticket revenue has slumped.

The Hawkeyes went from about $3.5 million in ticket sales in 2022-23 to just under $3 million in 2023-24 — nearly a 15 percent drop. It is the first time since 2017-18 in which the Hawkeyes failed to make at least $3 million in men’s basketball ticket revenue (excluding the COVID-19-affected 2020-21 fiscal year).

To make matters worse, many of the fans who did buy men’s basketball tickets often did not use them, based on tickets scanned data previously obtained by The Gazette via an open records request. Fran McCaffery’s program averaged 5,742 tickets scanned per game in 2023-24, which makes up less than half of Carver-Hawkeye Arena’s 14,998-seat capacity.

Men’s basketball operating revenue ($13.9 million) still exceeded operating expenses ($11.4 million), largely because of the $5.4 million in media rights income attributed to men’s basketball.

Contextualizing Iowa’s apparent $2.8 million surplus

Iowa’s NCAA financial filing reported $173.2 million in total operating revenue and $170.4 million in total operating expenses in 2023-24, netting what appears to be a $2.8 million surplus.

The NCAA’s method of gauging income and expenses varies from the university’s method, however. So the NCAA-measured $2.8 million surplus “isn’t apples-to-apples to our budget.”

“Our budget balances,” Davies told The Gazette. “But these other factors — with contributions for facilities and the outside items that are included in here — obviously affect that (NCAA-reported) bottom line.”

Most notably, the revenue and expense totals reported to the NCAA each include $6.7 million for donor-funded capital projects. Without that batch of one-time income and costs, Iowa would have reported about $166.5 million in operating revenue and $163.7 million in operating expenses. In-kind contributions and foundation activity are among the other things that differ between the NCAA and university’s budget measurements.

The total operating expenses included a $1.5 million payment in 2023-24 on the $50 million COVID-19 operating loan from the general university fund. The athletic department has 15 years to repay the 2021 loan although university officials have expressed interest in a faster payment timeline.

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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