Women’s college basketball continues to deliver strong television audiences.
A number of conference championship games either drew seven-figure audiences or set viewership records last weekend.
Headlining the bunch was Sunday’s Big Ten Tournament title game between old Pac-12 foes UCLA and USC. The game, which featured one of the sport’s most recognizable stars in JuJu Watkins, averaged 1.44 million viewers on CBS, per Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch. The Bruins’ comeback victory was the second most-watched Big Ten title game ever, trailing only the Caitlin Clark-fueled title game between Iowa and Nebraska last season, which drew 3.02 million viewers.
Overall, UCLA-USC was the fourth most-watched women’s college basketball game of the season behind a USC-UConn matchup in December that had an NFL lead-in (2.3 million viewers) and an ABC doubleheader in February featuring UConn-South Carolina (1.8 million viewers) and LSU-Texas (1.7 million viewers).
Moving to the other Power-2 conference championship, the SEC Tournament title game between South Carolina and Texas averaged 1.3 million viewers Saturday afternoon on ESPN. Like the Big Ten, it was the second most-watched SEC title game in history, trailing only last year’s South Carolina-LSU game featuring Angel Reese, per Sports Media Watch.
And while the ACC and Big 12 title games failed to eclipse the seven-figure threshold, both set new records for their respective conference championships. The ACC Tournament final between Duke and NC State averaged 833,000 viewers at 1 p.m. ET Sunday afternoon on ESPN, while the Big 12 tournament final between TCU and Baylor averaged 759,000 viewers at 5 p.m. ET Saturday evening on ESPN. Notably, the Big 12 title game competed almost directly with the Big Ten title game on CBS.
The conference tournaments continue a good run of viewership numbers for women’s college basketball in its post-Clark era. Recently, ESPN announced that its women’s college hoops viewership has increased 3% year-over-year. The network’s viewership figures are a good barometer for the growth of women’s college basketball writ large since it was largely unaffected by last year’s Clark-bump, considering ESPN does not own Big Ten rights.
The weekend’s viewership figures have to be encouraging for the sport’s stakeholders. Clark has clearly raised the floor for women’s basketball viewership, whether she is playing in a game or not.
Surely, ESPN is in for some major year-over-year declines when it comes to the upcoming NCAA women’s basketball tournament considering the absence of a Clark-like viewership draw. But it’ll be fascinating to see how this year’s tournament stacks up to the 2023, and even 2022 editions, when Clark was less of a factor.
If ESPN can post gains versus those years, it’ll be clear that women’s college basketball is continuing to win fans over.
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