You don’t have to inform ESPN senior vice president of production Meg Aronowitz about the challenge of producing the NCAA women’s basketball tournament without Caitlin Clark the year after she had galvanized the property to NFL viewership heights.
“You never want to be the guy that follows Nick Saban, right?” Aronowitz said, laughing.
There is an interesting duality with the women’s tournament this year. The sport is as hot as ever and includes stars in every corner of America from USC’s JuJu Watkins to UConn’s Paige Bueckers to Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo to Texas’ Madison Booker. Regular season games were up three percent year-over-year across all of ESPN properties — and up an eye-popping 41 percent over 2023. But it will be nearly impossible for ESPN to match last year’s title game viewership between South Carolina and Iowa, a game that averaged an astonishing 18.9 million viewers and peaked at 24.1 million viewers. That was a 90 percent increase from the 2023 title game and a 289 percent increase from 2022 — a unicorn among unicorn ratings.
“It is extremely healthy where women’s college basketball is, but it would take a miracle for the women’s title game to get 19 million viewers again,” said Aronowitz, the point person for ESPN’s…
