A Milestone Moment for Women’s Sports: 18.7 Million Tune In for South Carolina vs. Iowa Game
When the national championship game’s viewership numbers were made public on Monday, women’s college basketball received a fairy tale ending—something Caitlin Clark did not receive on Sunday afternoon in Cleveland.
An astounding 18.7 million people watched South Carolina’s victory over Iowa, with a peak viewership of 24.7 million. That represents a 285 percent increase from 2022 and an 89 percent increase from the 2023 championship game. According to ESPN, this is the most viewed basketball match since 2019—college or professional, men’s or women’s.
There has never been more interest in women’s collegiate basketball in Clark’s story or the sport in general. In the national semifinals, Iowa defeated UConn 71-69 in front of a peak audience of 17.2 million viewers, down from 14.2 million. For a little over 72 hours, that broke the previous record for women’s college basketball viewership. The Elite Eight match between Iowa and LSU drew an average of 12.3 million viewers and a peak of 16 million viewers. 6.9 million people watched the Hawkeyes defeat Colorado in the Sweet 16 on average. The crowd for Iowa’s victory over West Virginia in the second round of the NCAA Tournament was 4.9 million on ESPN, which at the time was the third-highest attendance for a women’s tournament match in the previous 20 years. These were previously unheard-of numbers in the women’s game for those rounds.
During the tournament, there were other incredible viewership figures that involved teams other than Iowa and Clark. The Huskies’ Elite Eight victory against USC attracted 6.7 million viewers, cementing UConn’s status as the sport’s standard bearer for viewing. With the exception of the previous year’s championship game, which peaked at 12.6 million and averaged a then-record 9.9 million viewers, UConn’s victory in the Elite Eight this year would have exceeded every previous title game ratings since 1996.
To put the South Carolina-Iowa viewership in perspective, the game topped:
- Every World Series match since the 2019 World Series’ seventh game
- Every NBA Finals match since the 2017 NBA Finals’ Game 5
- Every Daytona 500 since 2008
- Every Masters final round viewership since 2001
- All but four college football games in 2023
Clark is now joining the WNBA, where the draft is scheduled for April 15. Her departure will definitely lower the number of spectators for the NCAA Tournament the next year. How were they not able to? Still, a portion of the millions of new viewers who sample the product in 2025 will remain. Then factor in more funding from ESPN and Fox Sports, which is sticking to its strategy of airing women’s basketball on Big Fox, as it did the previous season. This competition marked a turning point for collegiate women’s basketball. All the arrow is doing is rising.
(Photo: Thien-An Truong / Getty Images)