Oklahoma’s fourth-straight college softball national championship attracted the largest audience yet for the best-of-three championship series.
Thursday’s Game 2 of the Women’s College World Series Final (Oklahoma-Texas) averaged 2.04 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest WCWS audience since Oklahoma-Florida State Game 2 in 2021 (2.10M) and the second-largest in the last nine years.
The Sooners’ title-clinching win, which peaked with 2.5 million viewers, ranks fifth all-time among Women’s College World Series games on ESPN (1990-present). Both games of this year’s series placed in the top ten.
Most-watched Women’s College World Series games
Viewership increased 9% from last year’s Game 2 (Oklahoma-Florida State: 1.86M) and 17% from 2022, which featured the same Oklahoma-Texas matchup (1.74M). That is despite this year’s game airing opposite the NBA Finals, while the neither of the prior games faced such competition.
For the year so far, Oklahoma-Texas ranks as the most-watched baseball or softball game on the ESPN networks — surpassing the previous high of 1.96 million for a Padres-Dodgers Sunday Night Baseball game in April. Across all networks, only two baseball windows have averaged more viewers this year, both on FOX.
The full two-game WCWS Final averaged 1.98 million viewers, surpassing the three-game Michigan-Florida series in 2013 (1.91M) as the most-watched under the best-of-three format that began in 2005. Viewership increased 22% from last year (1.62M) and 25% from 2022 (1.58M).
The complete WCWS averaged 1.1 million (+2%).
