JONI COMSTOCK: “If you take the eighty-eight championships and then you count each of the rounds within those championships and then all of the sites, we run seven hundred and fifty-six events all over the country.”

The NCAA has more than three hundred eighty professional employees working mainly at its headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana.

(MUSIC)

FAITH LAPIDUS:

APBoston University players celebrate after defeating Miami of Ohio for the championship in the final of the NCAA men's college hockey tournament Frozen Four in 2009

The Men’s and Women’s Final Four basketball championship receives a lot of attention at NCAA headquarters. But they are not even the last of the winter season championships. The division one hockey championship, called the Men’s Frozen Four, finishes on April tenth.

Still, it is hard to overstate the importance of the men’s and women’s division one basketball championships to the NCAA. The University of Oregon won the first men’s tournament in nineteen thirty-nine. That event was held at Northwestern University near Chicago. It lost money.

Today, money is not a problem. The NCAA has a contract with CBS Television to broadcast the men’s tournament. It is worth about six hundred seventeen million dollars this year. A contract with ESPN is worth seventy-three million dollars over the next four years. It includes broadcasting rights for the women’s championship games.