Sunday’s NCAA women’s basketball national championship game featuring the LSU Tigers and Iowa Hawkeyes drew 9.9 million viewers, according to ESPN. Here’s what you need to know:
- It is the most-viewed women’s college basketball game on record.
- The game’s viewership peaked at 12.6 million.
- LSU defeated Iowa 102-85, winning the program’s first national championship.
The Athletic’s instant analysis:
A game-changing moment for women’s college basketball
We tend to get cliché in calling things “game-changing,” but this viewership number is game-changing for women’s college basketball. The previous record for an NCAA women’s basketball title game in the ESPN era (since 1996) was 5.68 million viewers for UConn’s win over Oklahoma in 2002. (The previous all-time record, per Sports Media Watch, is believed to be 8.1 million viewers for a Virginia-Stanford national semifinal on CBS in 1992.) LSU’s win over Iowa obliterated it. Such a figure, in my estimation, changes public perception, investment, everything.
Some context: The 1999 Women’s World Cup final averaged 17.975 million viewers on ABC. It was a stunning number at the time and turbo-charged that sport. I think this will have the same effect.
This also isn’t a moment. The growth of women’s tournament viewership has been a multi-year play. The Iowa-South Carolina semifinal last Friday drew 5.5 million viewers. Last year’s final between South Carolina and UConn averaged 4.85 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, the most-watched title game since UConn-Tennessee in 2004. Last year’s semifinal game between UConn-Stanford averaged 3.23 million viewers across ESPN and ESPNU, the largest audience for a semifinal game since Baylor–Stanford in 2012 (3.76 million).
The game has gotten more athletic, faster and, most importantly, access to the game is much wider with increased television windows (including on ABC). Remember this day if you are a women’s basketball fan. Because you’ll be talking about it years from now. — Deitsch
Comparative context
Year 1 of “Thursday Night Football” streaming on Amazon Prime Video this past season averaged 9.58 million viewers in Nielsen Media Research-only audience numbers for the inaugural 15-game package. Nine “TNF” games averaged fewer than 9.9 million in Nielsen metrics.
This is another chunk of data that suggests, as the NCAA’s own recent gender equity study showed, that the women’s tournament is significantly undervalued as part of the 14-year, $500 million multi-sport bundled deal ESPN struck with the NCAA in 2011. — Shea
Backstory
The national championship viewership comes after record-setting national semifinals. Those two games — LSU versus Virginia Tech and South Carolina versus Iowa — combined to become the most-viewed Women’s Final Four matchups ever, averaging 4.5 million viewers.
Required reading
(Photo: Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
