Women's NCAA title game sets milestones
South Carolina's 87-75 victory over Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the women's NCAA championship game has achieved a pair of milestones.
It is the first time the women's title game outdrew the men. It also was the second most-watched non-olympic women's sporting event on U.S. television.
The Sunday afternoon game averaged 18.9 million viewers on ABC and ESPN while Uconn's 75-60 victory over Purdue in Monday night's men's final on TBS and TNT averaged 14.82 million.
The audience for Sunday's game — where the Gamecocks capped an undefeated season by winning their fourth national title and denied Clark's Hawkeyes their first — peaked at 24.1 million during the final 15 minutes. The 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup final between the U.S. and Japan averaged 25.4 million on Fox. That also was on a Sunday and took place in prime time on the East Coast.
The record for the most watched women's basketball game still belongs to the gold medal game of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics between the United States and Brazil, which averaged 19.5 million. South Carolina coach Dawn Staley was a member of the U.S. team.
Nielsen's numbers include an estimate of the number of people who watched outside their homes, which wasn't measured before 2020. As a result of cord-cutting, the in-home audience has steadily declined annually.
The audience for the national title game was up 90 per cent over last year, when Clark and Iowa fell to LSU. That also was the first time since 1995 that the championship was on network television.
The audience was 289 per cent bigger than the viewership for the Gamecocks' title win two years ago when they beat Uconn on ESPN.
Iowa's six NCAA Tournament games on ESPN and ABC averaged 10.07 million.