As March Madness draws to a close, what kind of audience should one expect for the men’s and women’s national championship games?
Is there enough leftover momentum to boost the women’s title game?
Two years ago, one of the biggest upsets in sports television history took place — appropriately enough during “March Madness.” The NCAA women’s basketball national championship delivered by a wide margin the largest audience in its history, and in the process outdrew the men’s title game for the first and only time.
Two years later, the national attention paid to the women’s tournament has largely subsided. But it has left behind an elevated audience that still towers over the years before Caitlin Clark ever stepped foot at Iowa. That leaves the women’s game in a curious position. It is rare for an event to be trending at a three-year low and still be on pace for its third-largest audience on record. (Comparisons to prior years are complicated by the fact that ESPN did not begin carrying every game nationally until 2021.)
Entering the Women’s Final Four, the tournament was averaging 937,000 viewers per game across the ESPN networks — down 4% from last year and a steeper 34% from the record levels of 2024, and those declines would surely be steeper if not for Nielsen’s methodological changes of recent years. At the same time, viewership remains up 42% from 2023 and 101% from 2022. This year’s average would have been a dream scenario three or four years ago.
It is thus a bit tricky to gauge exactly where the women’s game stands entering this year’s national championship. Clearly, the momentum of the past few years has slowed, but not enough to constitute a return to the pre-Clark era. Friday night proved that the tournament can still break into mainstream sports conversation, but the spotlight is less flattering when on Geno Auriemma’s postgame behavior rather than star players like Clark, Paige Bueckers or JuJu Watkins.
The star players of this season have largely not broken through into the national consciousness, which is to be expected. That kind of good fortune simply cannot happen every year. To an extent, this year has been a good test of the post-Clark era. How will the women’s game fare in a relatively ho-hum season? So far the answer has been mixed.
Expect that trend to continue into Sunday’s national championship between South Carolina and first-time NCAA finalist UCLA. Both UCLA and the team it defeated in the Final Four, Texas, were overshadowed by South Carolina-UConn — both on the court and off. It certainly did not help that UCLA-Texas was a slog of a game. As a result, this title game has the feel of an afterthought. A good game can change that, but on paper, this is not a matchup that measures up to the more titanic pairings of years past.
With this year’s game taking on Easter Sunday — which has become a day of strong sports viewing in the Nielsen out-of-home era — it is possible that viewership will hold up well relative to those past matchups. But last year’s 8.6 million for UConn-South Carolina just seems like too high a bar this time around.
— NCAA women’s basketball national championship: #1 South Carolina – #1 UCLA (3:30p Sun ABC, ESPN). Prediction: 6.8 million viewers.
Is Michigan too good for the networks’ own good?
The story of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament the past two years has been the decline of Cinderella. In the NIL era, the college game would seem to have lost the unpredictability that has been its calling card. No team symbolizes that shift more than Michigan, which has been routing quality teams all season long and did so again in the national semifinals Saturday night.
It is believed, and with good reason, that bluebloods are better for the ratings than Cinderellas. But good games are better for the ratings than blowouts. And if the bluebloods are so good that even other major programs are getting run off the court, it is hard to see there being much greater upside having Michigan in the title game than having San Diego State three years ago.
One need only look at the Elite Eight, when Michigan routed Tennessee by 33 points. With a 3.7 rating and 7.49 million viewers, the Wolverines’ win was quite possibly the lowest rated Elite Eight Sunday game on record, and only managed a larger audience than last year because of Nielsen’s aforementioned methodological changes. By comparison, a close game between San Diego State and Creighton had a 4.7 and 8.34 million in that same window three years ago, with less out-of-home viewing and no “Big Data” being tracked by Nielsen.
It would be overstating things to suggest that Michigan is a ratings drag. More like, Michigan (or any team) by 30 points is a ratings drag. If Monday’s national title game is close, the Wolverines’ presence should be a boon to TBS, TNT and truTV. After all, they played in four of the ten most-watched games during the regular season, second only to Duke (five).
A Michigan blowout on cable has potential to rank among the lesser-watched national title games, and there are several bearish indicators pointing in that direction. The Wolverines’ previous national title appearance against Villanova, which like this year’s game aired on cable, ranks as the third-least watched on record. Opponent UConn has played in three of the six least-watched title games, including the bottom two — their two previous appearances under Dan Hurley. And three of the four least-watched have aired exclusively on cable.
Given all of that, even in an NCAA Tournament that has thus far been riding a record pace, it is hard to expect viewership to measure up to last year’s Florida-Houston game on CBS (18.1M). A true wipeout might set an all-time record low (the current mark is 14.69 million for UConn-San Diego State), but the prediction here is a moderately close game and an audience that stays just out of that record-low range.
— NCAA men’s basketball national championship: #2 UConn – #1 Michigan (8:50p Mon, TBS, TNT and truTV). Prediction: 16.02 million viewers.
