The final game of Caitlin Clark’s collegiate career was the most-watched basketball game of any kind in five years.
Sunday’s South Carolina-Iowa NCAA women’s basketball national championship averaged a 9.3 rating and 18.88 million viewers across ABC (8.6, 17.48M), ESPN (0.8, 1.39M) and ESPN Deportes (0.01, 15K), marking the largest basketball audience (college or pro, men or women) since the 2019 Virginia-Texas Tech men’s national championship on CBS (19.63M).
The previous high over that span was 18.59 million for Game 6 of the 2019 Raptors-Warriors NBA Finals on ABC. (Keep in mind out-of-home viewing was not tracked in Nielsen final nationals until 2020.)
The 9.3 rating is the highest for any basketball game since the Baylor-Gonzaga men’s national championship on CBS in 2021 (9.4).
The Gamecocks’ win, which peaked with 24.1 million viewers in the final quarter-hour, delivered the largest non-football sports audience of any kind since the 2022 FIFA World Cup final on FOX and Univision (22.32M). That is the only sportscast outside of football and the Olympics to average a larger audience dating back to 2019. (Keep in mind World Cup figures include pre-match coverage.)
Ratings increased 80% and viewership 88% from last year’s LSU-Iowa title game, which at the time was the most-watched women’s college basketball game of the Nielsen people meter era (1988-present) with a 5.2 and 9.92 million. Compared to South Carolina-UConn two years ago — the final title game to air exclusively on cable for the foreseeable future — ratings and viewership increased threefold from a 2.7 and 4.85 million.
Viewership for the national title game has now increased in five consecutive years. In the first year of that streak, 2019, Baylor’s national title victory over Notre Dame averaged a mere 3.54 million.
The national title game was Iowa’s third-straight to set the all-time viewership record for women’s college basketball. Their Elite Eight win over LSU set the mark with 12.3 million last Monday and their Final Four victory over UConn drew 14.2 million on Friday, both on ESPN.
Outside of the NFL, it is rare for any matinee sporting event to deliver an audience of such size. With the caveat that out-of-home viewing was not tracked prior to 2020, it was the most-watched basketball game to air outside of primetime (7 PM on Sundays, 8 PM on all other days) since Michigan-Cincinnati in the 1992 Men’s Final Four, a game that began at 6 PM ET (19.88M).
