The Athletic has live coverage of women’s March Madness and every Sweet 16 matchup
Picture this: It’s the night of Selection Sunday. Both the men’s and women’s tournament brackets are set. You log onto a sportsbook and see that you can wager on every scheduled men’s game. Depending on what state you’re in, you can bet on futures, specific rounds of the tournament, game lines, spread, player props and team props.
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But the odds for the women’s games? Nowhere to be found.
The next day, Monday morning, still crickets.
A year ago, I wrote an article exploring the question of whether sportsbooks were keeping up with the growing popularity of women’s college basketball. The answer then was a resounding no. In all honesty, I set out to write this article expecting that I would find a similarly negative trend. And on the Monday morning after this year’s Selection Sunday, it looked like sportsbooks were behind the ball yet again.
But, slowly, a few markets started to roll in. DraftKings added the women’s tournament to its “popular” tab and had a point spread for every scheduled game, though not always a moneyline or total. FanDuel put up some game lines and player props for big names like Angel Reese (LSU), JuJu Watkins (USC), Hannah Hidalgo (Notre Dame), Paige Bueckers (UConn) — and a separate tab just for “Caitlin Clark Specials.”
The “Caitlin Clark effect” has hit sportsbooks.
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(Note: The so-called “Caitlin Clark effect” — increased attention, viewership, ticket sales and profits in the women’s game — is bigger than just one player. Although Clark is likely the biggest factor this year, we might also call it the Angel Reese Rise, the South Carolina Surge … I could go on, but I will spare you.)
Ultimately, what I found in my research this year was a more positive trend than I expected in the number and variety of markets on women’s college hoops year over year — but still a massive opportunity gap between the men’s and women’s tournaments.
In past years, the betting markets available for the women’s tournament were much more limited than what we’re seeing this year. Odds for individual games, especially for the earlier rounds, were hard to find, and player props were almost unheard of. During the regular season, most sportsbooks had only futures odds for the women’s side. Meanwhile, the men’s tournament had markets galore: player props, game props, specials, same-game parlays, alternate spreads, alternate totals, halves, futures, etc. This year we’re seeing more of those props, specials and futures for the women’s side.
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What changed? If you ask sportsbooks, they’ll say customer interest.
This year, the women’s NCAA Tournament is more popular than perhaps ever before. Thanks to slowly increasing parity among teams and greater NCAA investment, the women’s sport is delivering bona fide stars and more visible rivalries and setting new records. And all that attention means the betting markets are getting bigger and more competitive, too.
BetMGM says they saw over 2.5 times more bets on the women’s college basketball regular season than last year. For the NCAA Tournament, total bets on futures increased 130 percent since last year and a whopping 709 percent since 2022 (as of March 15, 2024). BetMGM’s most bet-on women’s regular-season game was the Ohio State vs. Iowa matchup when Clark broke the all-time NCAA scoring record.
FanDuel says that bet count is up 139 percent since last year for the first two rounds of the women’s tournament, and that active customers betting on the women’s markets have increased by 172 percent. DraftKings says they have had 13X growth year over year in betting volume on the women’s tournament.
“The growth year on year has been exponential, driven by prominent players like Caitlin Clark becoming household names and an increase in the number of televised women’s games,” said Matt Cosgriff, BetMGM’s director of retail trading and customer analysis.
But sportsbooks still have a long way to go toward offering the same kind of action on the women’s tournament as the men’s. On FanDuel, the “March Madness” tab only includes the men’s games. On BetMGM, you couldn’t get game lines or futures on the women’s side for days after Selection Sunday. Across sportsbooks, the men’s tournament still had at least three times as many markets as the women’s over the first two rounds.
Now we’re getting deep into the betting weeds, but sportsbooks also have stricter limits on the NCAAW markets.
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According to The Athletic’s Austin Mock, “In general, the higher the limits — or the maximum bet amount — allowed by a sportsbook, the sharper the market. When it comes to men’s college basketball, limits aren’t very high but are much higher than women’s college basketball. Circa Sports in Las Vegas — widely considered one of the sharpest sportsbooks in the world — currently is posting limits of $10,000 on spread, $5,000 on moneyline and $2,000 on totals for the men’s Sweet 16 games. For the women’s Sweet 16 games, they’re offering $3,000 on spread, $2,000 on moneyline and $500 on totals. The sharpest sports bettors in the world like to invest their time where they can get the most bang for their buck, and as of right now, the women’s game isn’t being offered near the same limits or the pure volume of offerings as the men’s.”
As Jordan Brenner and Peter Keating wrote last year, women’s sports have been caught in a vicious cycle where “low investment and publicity lead to limited public interest, rights deals and sponsorships, which lead to low pay for athletes, which hurts the development of new talent, which leads to … low investment and publicity.”
Sportsbooks are right in that cycle as well. They are clearly responding now to the heightened interest in women’s sports. But sportsbooks also have a strong impact on fan interest. One study from Variety found that 41 percent of bettors on the NCAA watch more sports than usual when they can bet on a game. The same study also found that up to 30 percent of bettors became new fans of a team as a result of betting on that team’s games.
So, what is holding women’s college betting markets — which could contribute to the growth of the sport — back?
A big part of this is the parity problem. Since its inception in 1982, the women’s NCAA Tournament has been considerably less competitive than its men’s counterpart. With only a few teams dominating the courts for decades, bettors couldn’t much benefit from putting cash on underdogs. The tournament was, in betting terms, chalk.
A FanDuel spokesperson said: “The men’s markets still garner more interest than the women’s game does, especially if you look at the difference in parity between higher and lower seeds, particularly in the early rounds. On men’s, it might be fun for a fan to bet the moneyline on an underdog in the first two rounds. On the women’s side, you’re seeing 50-point blowouts.”
As Keating and Brenner have pointed out, the women’s game has made massive strides in parity over the past few years, but the gap between the top and bottom seeds is still massive, and this year had fewer upsets than recent years. South Carolina won its first two games by 52 and 47 points.
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“There’s more talent flowing into more programs in the women’s game than ever before,” wrote Keating and Brenner. “But there are still fewer than a dozen teams that can compete for a national title, and maybe another 15 beyond them that are strong enough to belong in the top half of brackets. And the gap … is still pretty vast on the women’s side.”
Another gap for women’s markets is data. Women’s sports don’t have nearly the depth and breadth of data that men’s sports do. Sue Bird wrote a piece in 2016 highlighting this analytics gap. Our Bracket Breakers team of Keating and Brenner make predictions with less women’s data because the box scores they need aren’t available as far back. They wrote in 2023: “[E]ven when leagues collect data on female athletes, they don’t often make it easy or cheap for the rest of us to find or use.” In 2015, visual journalist Allison McCann wrote a piece titled, “Hey, Nate: There Is No ‘Rich Data’ In Women’s Sports.”
While we could argue about the chicken or the egg — does customer interest or more data or more parity or a sportsbook market come first? — it’s a fact that fans discover markets when sportsbooks market them well. More parity will require more investment from the NCAA, schools, broadcast networks, media companies (we can point at ourselves!) — and, yes, sportsbooks.
Selection Sunday highlighted the stark contrast that still exists between men’s and women’s college ball: Men’s odds are available earlier and in larger quantity. But the exponential growth in betting options for the women’s tournament this year shows that, slowly, sportsbooks are catching up.
(Photo of Caitlin Clark: Matthew Holst / Getty Images)
