The NCAA has signed a new eight-year championship media rights agreement with ESPN, starting September 1, 2024 that will include domestic rights to 40 NCAA championships including DI Women's Basketball and Men's and Women's Basketball Invitationals, and international rights to those 40 events and the DI Men's Basketball Tournament. SBJ's Ben Portnoy reports the deal is worth an average of $115M per year, up from the current total of around $40M per year, with "at least 25% of that value (around $28.75 million) includes production and marketing costs assumed by ESPN." NCAA President Charlie Baker on the deal and WBB: “If you look at the numbers across most of these sports, they've all done far better over the past few years. And we fully expect the reason we got three-times [our previous deal] is because they're all going to do far better going forward. [...] What we had always said was we wanted the best deal for all of our championships. If you think about it, it's [2,300] hours of programming, which over the eight years of the deal will take place in an enormous number of settings with a whole variety of challenges and on the ground circumstances that make this something where if you can get a production partner who's willing to bite the whole thing off at a price that we believe is more than market competitive, we thought that was a better way to go.” (link, link)