Sunday’s NCAA women’s basketball national championship game featuring the LSU Tigers and Iowa Hawkeyes drew 9.9 million viewers, according to ESPN. Here’s what you need to know:
- It is the most-viewed women’s college basketball game on record.
- The game’s viewership peaked at 12.6 million.
- LSU defeated Iowa 102-85, winning the program’s first national championship.
The Athletic’s instant analysis:
A game-changing moment for women’s college basketball
We tend to get cliché in calling things “game-changing,” but this viewership number is game-changing for women’s college basketball. The previous record for an NCAA women’s basketball title game in the ESPN era (since 1996) was 5.68 million viewers for UConn’s win over Oklahoma in 2002. (The previous all-time record, per Sports Media Watch, is believed to be 8.1 million viewers for a Virginia-Stanford national semifinal on CBS in 1992.) LSU’s win over Iowa obliterated it. Such a figure, in my estimation, changes public perception, investment, everything.
Some context: The 1999 Women’s World Cup final averaged 17.975 million viewers on ABC. It was a stunning number at the time and turbo-charged that sport. I think this will have the same effect.
This also isn’t a moment. The growth of women’s…
