On April 7th, 2024, the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship averaged 18.87 million viewers for the South Carolina/Iowa final, according to Nielsen. The Men’s Championship averaged a lower 14.82 million viewers for the UConn/Purdue final.
These numbers are significant because this season clearly shows the increased popularity of Women’s College Basketball in ways that it hasn’t seen before last year. Additionally, this year had a larger increase in viewership compared to last year for the Women’s March Madness Tournament compared to its counterpart.
“With final Nielsen reporting completed, Sunday’s epic title bout between No. 1 women’s seeds Iowa and South Carolina scored 18.9 million viewers,” ESPN spokesperson Amanda Brooks said. “The showdown peaked at 24.1 million viewers in the game’s final 15 minutes as South Carolina stormed to their second NCAA trophy in three years.”
A big reason for this recent increase can be attributed to the popularity of rising stars in Women’s CBB like Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese. As a guard for the Hawkeyes, Clark has put up 1000+ point totals in her last two seasons, with two championship appearances. Angel Reese, forward for the LSU Tigers, won the National Championship in 2023 against Clark and the Hawkeyes. This rivalry has been discussed to a great length in sports media, mostly questioning the superiority of one player over the other. This discourse put WBB into the spotlight both on social media and in traditional media. Everyone had their own views on who was the better player, even if they weren’t avid followers of WBB.
“I think Reese is definitely the better player, she has a ring unlike Clark,” Misheel Uuganbat said. “Iowa just got lucky this year, Reese was trying to do everything by herself.
The popularity of these two players was clearly on display when the WNBA draft took place on April 15, 2024, just over a week after the Women’s Championship. Clark was the first overall pick in the draft, being drafted to the Indiana Fever. Angel Reese was drafted 7th overall to the Chicago Sky. Predictably, the viewership of this draft was an all-time record for the WNBA, with a record 2.45 million viewers tuning in to see the biggest stars in Women’s College Basketball go professional. This was a huge increase from the 572,200 viewers the draft had in 2023.
“Reese is going to be an absolute stud in the WNBA”, Uuganbat said. “She probably won’t get paid as much as she did at Iowa with NIL, but she’s gonna go far.”
Another reason for this outperformance could also be attributed to the lack of underdogs in the Men’s tournament. March Madness is a time of crazy upsets, and teams of very low prevalence making it all the way to the final stages of the tournament. This year, the Men’s championship was between the Purdue Boilermakers and the UConn Huskies. Both of these teams could be considered “Blue Bloods”, or teams that frequently make it to this stage. These were truly the two best teams this season, but March Madness audiences love to see new or unexpected teams make it to the finals. This lack of an underdog may have caused fewer people to tune into the Men’s Championship, as it simply didn’t interest them.
“Nobody wants to see the same four teams make it over and over again,” LSU fan Tyler Ellis said. “It’s just like when the Patriots kept going to the Super Bowl when they had Brady. It gets boring.”
