A top-five matchup on Super Sunday delivered one of the largest regular season women’s basketball audiences in years.
Sunday’s LSU-South Carolina women’s college basketball game averaged a 0.8 rating and 1.47 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest audience for a regular season women’s game since Stanford-UConn drew 2.1 million in 2010. South Carolina this season has played in the two most-watched regular season games of the past six years, with their matchup against UConn scoring 1.09 million on FOX earlier this month.
For the weekend, the Gamecocks’ win ranked third among all college basketball games behind the Duke-Virginia (1.0, 1.75M) and Indiana-Michigan (0.9, 1.68M) men’s games on ESPN the previous day. It outdrew the competing Michigan State-Ohio State men’s game on CBS (0.7, 1.21M).
For the entirety of Super Bowl Sunday, the game trailed only the post-game NFL Primetime (1.47M) as ESPN’s most-watched program — growing out of its Sunday NFL Countdown lead-in (1.21M).
Compared to a Notre Dame-Louisville women’s game in the same Super Bowl Sunday window last year, ratings and viewership soared over a 0.28 and 460,000.
In addition to hitting a 13-year high for a women’s college game, LSU-South Carolina also outdrew every WNBA game in recent memory, regular season or playoffs.
As for the previously-mentioned men’s games, both Duke-Virginia and Indiana-Michigan jumped double-digits over last year’s equivalent windows (Florida-Kentucky: 0.6, 1.14M; Ohio State-Michigan: 0.7, 1.19M).
(Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 2.14, network PR)
