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Ratings for the women’s NCAA tournament continued to soar as Sunday’s championship game stood as the most-watched women’s college basketball game on record.
The matchup between Iowa and South Carolina brought in 18.9 million viewers across ABC and ESPN, according to Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, and peaked at a viewership of 24.1 million, boosting the game to rank as the second most-watched non-Olympic women’s sporting event ever on U.S. television, behind only the 2015 Women’s World Cup final.
Viewership for the Sunday game, which saw the South Carolina Gamecocks defeat the Iowa Hawkeyes 87-75, was up 89% from the 2023 national championship game, and saw a whopping 285% increase from the 2022 game.
Overall, the game scored the biggest audience any basketball game — including men’s or women’s college or professional games — has seen since 2019. It also ranked as the most-watched sporting event since 2019, when including viewership figures for football and the Olympics.
“With a record-setting audience of 18.7 million viewers, Sunday’s Iowa-South Carolina title game was a fitting finale to the most-viewed ever NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament,” ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in a statement. “These exceptional athletes, coaches and teams captured our attention in unprecedented ways and it’s incumbent on all of us to keep the incredible momentum going. I’m also very proud of our talented and committed employees for how they presented this historic event.”
Ratings for the championship game were up 31.7% from last week’s final four matchup against Iowa and University of Connecticut, which drew 14.2 million viewers. When averaging the game’s viewership with the other final four game between South Carolina and NC State, which brought in 7.1 million viewers, the round marked the most-watched women’s national semifinals on record with an average 10.8 million viewers, up 138% when compared to year-over-year viewing figures.
Iowa’s Caitlin Clark has continued to captivate viewers throughout the season, with the Elite Eight game against LSU scoring 12.3 million viewers, which marked the most-watched women’s college basketball game on record at the time.
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