How NCAA tournament run is a financial boost in a year when Winthrop needs it most
He wasn’t decked out in a Big South championship T-shirt, nor did he dance at center court with the Big South championship trophy or climb the ladder and snip off a piece of net that hung in the Winthrop Coliseum.
But Winthrop athletic director Ken Halpin, who watched Sunday’s celebration from the sideline, knew how special this win was. Perhaps he knew better than anyone.
The Winthrop men’s basketball team earned an NCAA Tournament bid on Sunday, its second in as many years and its third in the past decade, and the accomplishment is vital to Winthrop in a variety of ways.
For one, and perhaps most apparently, the NCAA tournament provides publicity the university couldn’t obtain by any other means: Tune into ESPN any time leading up to Selection Sunday, and find clips of Winthrop’s 27-point win over Campbell playing every half-hour. National analysts, tasked with talking about the end-of-year tournament, will be disproportionately focused on the few teams who’ve already clinched March Madness bids before the Power Five conference tournaments are decided — and Winthrop is one of those teams.
That’s important, of course, because Winthrop University’s business model, like other colleges, is centered on attracting and retaining students. Plus, finding donors and ancillary funding is critical to the Winthrop athletic department’s sustenance, which is made easier by more exposure.
“When we have that type of success, and when our name is in the national conversation, that helps everything,” Winthrop basketball coach Pat Kelsey told reporters Sunday after the game. “That raises all boats.”
But earning an automatic bid into the 2021 NCAA tournament also has direct financial benefits, Halpin told The Herald. And those benefits come at the end of a year that has seen a pandemic squeeze and exacerbate pre-existing issues within college athletic budgets across the country — including at Winthrop, which discontinued its tennis programs in June.
“So yeah, we’re going to have an all-staff (meeting Monday) morning, and we’re going to talk about more stuff that stinks,” Halpin said Sunday, “but at least we have one very bright light to talk about. It feels like it’s been a year of choosing the least-worst option, you know what I mean?”
Big South tournament title gives Winthrop $100,000
Depending on where the team from Rock Hill is seeded by the NCAA selection committee, Winthrop can lock in benefits of up to $175,000 this year, per the Big South’s Basketball Incentive Plan.
The school will receive $100,000 for winning the Big South tournament championship and earning an automatic bid into the NCAAs. It could also earn an additional $75,000 from the conference if it is selected as a 12 seed or better on Selection Sunday, a reasonable prospect considering the impressive 23-1 record Winthrop maintained and the notoriety it built while on its 21-game winning streak that stemmed from last season.
The Eagles will learn their opponent this coming Sunday and start tournament play next week.
To put the $175,000 in context, the Winthrop basketball team brought in just over $1.9 million in revenue in fiscal year 2019, per documents secured by The Herald via a Freedom of Information Act request. In that same year, ticket sales — a revenue stream that was largely non-existent in the 2020-21 season due to COVID concerns — accounted for $94,367 of revenue.
This financial incentivization from the conference is a deliberate one, said Big South Commissioner Kyle Kallander, who was present for the championship game in Rock Hill on Sunday.
“A few years ago, as our emphasis on basketball increased, we changed our revenue distribution formula to incentivize and reward teams that make postseason play, especially the men’s basketball teams,” Kallander told The Herald. The commissioner, who’s been at his post for over 24 years, added that the conference made this shift in part because “the recognition that you get for winning the Big South Conference championship and going to the NCAAs is almost incalculable.”
“If we’re fortunate enough to get a good seed, win, then you become a Cinderella,” he said. “And then, I mean, people are still talking about when Winthrop (won in 2007). Heck, people are still talking about when Coastal Carolina gave Indiana a game back in 1992. … That’s the kind of exposure and recognition that you really can’t buy.”
What happens if Winthrop wins in the NCAAs?
There’s more money on the line, too, once Winthrop enters the NCAA tournament.
For every game a Big South team plays in the tournament, the conference receives an additional “unit” — a measurement by which the NCAA distributes revenue from the event. Once a conference obtains a unit, it receives that amount each year for the next six years.
This year, Kallander said, a unit is close to $300,000.
“They pay out to each conference, kind of a base level of six units, so it would be one game for every year for the past six years,” Kallander said, adding, “Right now, we have seven units because Radford won in Dayton in the First Four (in 2018).”
In other words, a Big South team’s win, and thus a Big South conference team’s additional game in the NCAA Tournament, brings another financial “unit” that the conference can then distribute to its member schools.
The reward for the school that delivers an additional unit to the conference? $50,000 each year for the next six years, Kallander said.
This means that if Winthrop earns a 12 seed and makes a run to the Sweet Sixteen — something no Big South conference team has ever done — the team can earn $275,000 from Big South postseason incentives in this year alone, in addition to the other opportunities for patronage and attention a Cinderella run could bring.
“This is the stuff you never take for granted,” Halpin said. “What it matters for is Rock Hill.”
Halpin went on to point out that David Tepper, the owner of the Carolina Panthers, and his wife and his entourage were seated in Section 109 of the Winthrop Coliseum for the Big South tournament final. The multibillionaire, who last year announced plans for the Panthers’ headquarters to be based in Rock Hill, was decked out in Winthrop Eagles gear. ESPN picked him out of the crowd and highlighted his presence mid-broadcast.
“The fact that Tepper took time to be here, that’s for Rock Hill,” Halpin said. “He cares about seeing Rock Hill becoming something significant. Well, this is part of that. The connectivity and the ideas that could come from that. That’s what this is for.
“This is for the community we live in, who our athletes compete for, the pride that it means to live in Rock Hill. Because Rock Hill is exploding. So the pride and what it means to be a resident here is evolving rapidly, and this is part of that story.”
When is the NCAA Selection Sunday show?
Winthrop will learn its NCAA Tournament opponent when the 2021 bracket is revealed at 6 p.m. Sunday, March 14 on CBS.
When does the NCAA tournament begin?
All the 2021 NCAA men’s tournament games will take place in or around Indianapolis in a bubble environment. The First Four games are March 18, with first round games March 19 and 20
This story was originally published March 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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