The women\u2019s Final Four this weekend is set to smash viewership records as star players and greater TV coverage drive more fans than ever to the sport.<\/p>\n
It kicks off this evening with No. 1 seed South Carolina facing off against No. 3 seed N.C. State at 7 p.m., followed by No. 1 seed Iowa competing against No. 3 seed UConn. <\/p>\n
Ratings for the tournament are expected to reach well into the double-digit millions. Last week\u2019s Iowa-LSU matchup reached 12.3 million, a new record for women\u2019s and the second-most-watched game of the entire NCAA basketball tournament, irrespective of gender.<\/p>\n
According to the ticket site TickPick, the current \u201cget-in\u201d price for the men\u2019s Final Four is $416; for the women\u2019s, it\u2019s $451.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Soaring interest in the women\u2019s game is the product of two main phenomena, experts say: a new batch of stars, including a once-in-a-generation player; and the increasing coverage those players now receive, thanks to greater investment from networks in broadcasting the games.<\/p>\n
At the top of the star wave stands Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa guard who has broken not only the most records for scoring in the women\u2019s game, but earlier this year surpassed Pete Maravich as the all-time leading NCAA career basketball scorer, period. That\u2019s a record that had stood for 54 years.<\/p>\n
Clark has been a standout since her arrival at Iowa four years ago, leading the Hawkeyes to the Sweet 16 as a freshman while being unanimously named\u00a0Big 10 Freshman of the Year\u00a0and first-team All-Big Ten.<\/p>\n
She has gone on to win the NCAA\u2019s most valuable player award the past two years.<\/p>\n
At the conclusion of this season, Clark, 22, will leave for the WNBA.<\/p>\n
Yet other stars are primed to keep the momentum going for the women\u2019s games, said Ben Portnoy, who covers college sports for Sports Business Journal. While legendary women\u2019s coaches like Tennessee\u2019s Pat Summitt, who died in 2016, and UConn\u2019s Geno Auriemma used to be the biggest names in the game, increased \u2014 and more consistent \u2014 media coverage has led to more players sharing in the spotlight.<\/p>\n
In the 2021 season, ESPN and ABC switched to a national broadcast format for the women\u2019s tournament that matched how the mens tournament was televised.<\/p>\n
\u2018Broadcast, over the air coverage, had been lacking,\u2019 said Jon Lewis, who runs Sports Media Watch, a website that tracks athletics broadcasting.<\/p>\n
He said ESPN simply took a calculated gamble that there was finally enough demand for the women\u2019s game that keeping it on regional broadcasts or on secondary networks like ESPN 2 was limiting opportunities for growth.<\/p>\n
\u201cESPN\u2019s a business \u2014\u00a0there\u2019s no charity involved here,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cIf they see the women\u2019s Final Four is getting traction on ESPN 2, they started to wonder how many more it could get on ESPN.\u201d<\/p>\n
The increased coverage has coincided with a key differentiator that now separates the men\u2019s and women\u2019s games: professional eligibility rules \u2014 something that is allowing the women\u2019s game to produce more stars more consistently than the men\u2019s teams. <\/p>\n
While women cannot go pro until they turn 22, the age limit is just 19 with one year of college for men. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe front-line stars in men\u2019s aren\u2019t sticking around as much as in the women\u2019s game,\u201d Portnoy said. \u201cThe women\u2019s game benefits from that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the new crop set to dominate next season\u2019s women\u2019s game: the University of Southern California\u2019s Juju Watkins, Villanova\u2019s Lucy Olsen and Notre Dame\u2019s Hannah Hidalgo. <\/p>\n
Portnoy said that as a result of men\u2019s players going pro earlier, there may now be fewer household names in that sport than in women\u2019s. And that\u2019s reflected in some women\u2019s games earning higher ratings this year than men\u2019s games. <\/p>\n
But while the men\u2019s game may also increasingly suffer from a lack of stars, there is less structural need for them to get eyeballs, Lewis said. Instead, the lack of some traditional male-dominated powerhouses, like Duke or Kentucky, making it to the final rounds has also kept ratings growth slow this year.<\/p>\n
The women\u2019s game is more star-driven, Lewis said. <\/p>\n
The end of Clark\u2019s superstar college career could mean this year proves a high watermark for women\u2019s tournament viewership, he said. At the same time, a new viewership floor has been set \u2014 and a lesson learned by the networks that the audiences for the women\u2019s game are potentially huge. <\/p>\n
\u2018Between the growth underway before Caitlin Clark, and the growth attributable to Caitlin Clark \u2014 I\u00a0don\u2019t see us going back to the era where it averaged fewer than 3 million viewers,\u2019 Lewis said. \u2018So there\u2019s a new permanent higher bar for this tournament going forward.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The women\u2019s Final Four this weekend is set to smash viewership records as star players and greater TV coverage drive more fans than ever to the sport. It kicks off this evening with No. 1 seed South Carolina facing off against No. 3 seed N.C. State at 7 p.m., followed by No. 1 seed Iowa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2839,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}