NCCA women’s tourney wins big

Maybe you have a personal anecdote about the NCAA women’s college basketball tournament’s overdue ascent to can’t-miss-this status on the sports landscape.

Here’s mine. My 82-year-old father and his older brother ordered a couple of pizzas and planned a nice Sunday around watching the Louisiana State-Iowa championship game on ABC last weekend.

I’m pretty sure that’s not something they would have considered in the days of Carol Blazejowski. Not that they would have been able to find the game on television decades ago if they had wanted to.

Of course, the strongest confirmation of the wide appeal of this year’s women’s Final Four is found not in anecdotes, but in the data.

I anticipated record-setting viewership for the championship game, which featured Iowa phenomenon Caitlin Clark and a deep Louisiana State team led by Angel Reese. The ratings for Iowa’s upset of unbeaten South Carolina two days earlier was a strong indicator — that game averaged 5.5 million viewers, the most ever for a women’s semifinal.

And the championship game, which had been on ESPN from 1996 to 2022, was moved from cable to network television this year, ensuring a bump in viewership just based on household availability.

But not even the most optimistic women’s college basketball fan could have anticipated how huge the viewership would ultimately be.

Louisiana State’s 102-85 win over Iowa averaged a staggering 9.9 million viewers on ABC, making it the most-watched women’s basketball game in history, surpassing a 1992 Stanford-Virginia Final Four game on CBS that averaged 8.1 million viewers. This year’s viewership was more than double last year’s average of 4.9 million viewers for a South CarolinaUConn title game.

That 9.9 million average meant the championship game was watched by more viewers than this year’s Daytona 500 (8.2 million on Fox), roughly the same as Game 7 of the Celtics-Heat Eastern Conference final (9.88 million), more than any Stanley Cup

Final game since the 1970s, and in the ballpark of Game 1 of the ’22 World Series between the Phillies and Astros (11.5 million).

The UConn-San Diego St. matchup in Monday night’s men’s final on CBS averaged 14.69 million viewers, or approximately 4.8 million more than the women’s final, but to consider that any kind of edge for the men’s game would be to ignore all trends.

UConn’s 76-59 victory was the least-watched men’s title game on record. It was down 14 percent from last year’s Kansas-North Carolina final, (17.05 million), which aired on TBS, TNT, and TruTV. The leastwatched final, Villanova-Michigan in 2018 (15.9 million), also aired on those cable channels.

The biggest factor as I see it with the rise of popularity of women’s basketball on television is the staying power of the top players. Clark is so skilled that on the ESPN2 simulcast of the final, Sue Bird noted to Diana Taurasi that the Iowa sensation was a combination of both of them as a player. There’s not much higher praise than that — and Clark, with her huge and growing fan base, has another year of eligibility.

That’s a contrast to the current state of men’s college basketball, which lacks continuity with whatever stars it has. The Final Four probably did not feature an NBA lottery pick in the upcoming draft, and the finest players usually don’t stay for more than a year.

If you want to see men’s college basketball at its best, watch ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary “Requiem for the Big East” one more time. If you want to watch the best of the women’s game, you just did, and there’s more to come.

Toucher taking a break

Fred Toucher, cohost of 98.5 The Sports Hub’s ratings-juggernaut morning show, announced on Twitter Friday afternoon that he will be away from the program for an undisclosed period while he seeks a solution for a throat problem that has affected his voice for several weeks. “Just wanted you guys to know that I had an exam of my throat today,’’ he tweeted. “They found some things that aren’t ideal. I am under orders not to talk at all. I will undergo surgery soon. So obviously I’ll be off the air for [a while]. I have the best doc so that’s good.” . . .

Jim Nantz’s goodbye from CBS’s

NCAA Tournament broadcasts was fittingly heartfelt and schmaltzy. His signoff — “Thank you for being my friend” — was a play on his trademark “Hello, friends” salutation and, amusingly, a line from the “The Golden Girls” theme song. Nantz called 32 men’s Final Fours, but it’s not as if he’s going to be scarce. He remains CBS’s lead voice for The Masters and the No. 1 play-by-play voice on its NFL broadcasts . . . Those new fancy, flashing LED lights used for celebrations might look cool in person at Fenway, but they look terrible on NESN. I did find myself wondering what Dennis Eckersley and the late Jerry Remy would have had to say about them. Probably would have led to another Studio 54 discussion like the hilarious conversation they had during the

2020 season about the iconic discoera New York City nightclub.