What are NCAA tournament units, and how much do men’s and women’s teams get?

That is starkly different on the men’s side, where “units” are awarded to conferences for each game played, then distributed to member schools. Through the units program, the teams in the men’s Final Four — Connecticut, Purdue, Alabama and North Carolina State — already have earned approximately $10 million each for their conferences to be paid out across the next six years (starting in 2025).

What have South Carolina, Iowa, Connecticut and N.C. State earned their conferences and themselves by making the women’s Final Four in Cleveland? Nothing.

But with the NCAA’s new television deal with ESPN, units should come to women’s basketball in the near future, possibly by next year’s tournament. NCAA President Charlie Baker has said as much. The media contract, signed in January, is for eight years and $920 million, including women’s basketball and a list of nonrevenue sports. Women’s basketball is valued at $65 million per tournament, roughly 10 times more than in the contract that ends this year.

“It’s not a matter of if. I think it’s when,” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said Wednesday. “To me, it shows the maturation of an incredible game and the growth that we’ve all benefited from. Now, how do you execute it? Where do the dollars come from? How do you assess what the units are worth, et cetera? To be having these types of conversations, it’s reflective of the elevation of women’s sports.

“But this has to be the beginning of those talks, not the end. There’s a lot more to address.”

A loose road map for potential implementation, according to an NCAA spokeswoman: The NCAA’s finance committee is workshopping models for a women’s tournament units program. Some key questions, among others, are when it would start, what the value of each unit would be and how and when they would be paid. For example, the NCAA could decide to start payments in the same year that units are earned (rather than waiting a year as on the men’s side).

Later this month, after the tournaments wrap, the finance committee is expected to meet with the women’s basketball oversight committee and the Division I women’s basketball committee, which runs the tournament. NCAA officials are also crowdsourcing with conference commissioners because conferences would control the payouts. It will be a frequent topic of conversation in Cleveland.…