No game could reach last year’s star-studded heights, but viewership remained historically strong for women’s college basketball conference title games.
Sunday’s UCLA-USC Big Ten Tournament final averaged 1.44 million viewers on CBS, trailing only Caitlin Clark-led Iowa against Nebraska last year (3.02M) as the largest audience on record for the game. Viewership for the matchup of longtime Pac-12 rivals was the same as last year’s USC-Stanford Pac-12 Tournament final, which aired on ESPN.
UCLA’s win, which peaked with 2.13 million viewers, delivered the fourth-largest audience of the women’s season — behind a December USC-UConn game on FOX that had an NFL lead-in (2.3M) and an ABC doubleheader of UConn-South Carolina (1.8M) and LSU-Texas (1.7M) in February.
Earlier in the day, ESPN averaged 1.3 million for the South Carolina-Texas SEC Tournament final — trailing only South Carolina against Angel Reese and LSU last year (2.0M) as the most watched edition of the game.
If no match for last year, both games easily exceeded 2023 — when the South Carolina-Tennessee SEC title game drew 866,000 and the Iowa-Ohio State Big Ten title game drew 745,000, both on ESPN.
In other championship week action, the Duke-NC State ACC Tournament final and TCU-Baylor Big 12 Tournament final both set new viewership records with an average of 833,000 and 759,000 respectively. The former increased 23% from last year and the latter 126%.
On Monday night, the UConn-Creighton Big East Tournament final averaged 492,000 viewers on FS1, the second-largest audience for the tournament since it moved to Fox Sports. The record was set by the previous day’s UConn-Villanova semifinal, which averaged 748,000 on the FOX broadcast network.
As for the regular season, the ESPN networks averaged 280,000 for regular season games — not counting championship week — up 3% from last year and the highest average since the 2008-09 season. (Keep in mind that Caitlin Clark rarely played on ESPN last season, as the network is not a Big Ten rights partner.)
In particular, ESPN averaged 511,000 viewers (+13%) and ABC scored 1.2 million for its three games (+120%).
