Viewership for the NCAA women’s basketball tournament is trailing the past two years heading into the Final Four, but remains on the higher end historically.
Entering the Women’s Final Four, the NCAA women’s basketball tournament was averaging 931,000 viewers per game across the ESPN family of networks — down 4% from last year (967K) and 34% from the record-setting pace two years ago (1.4M). This year’s tournament trails only the past two years as the most ‘consumed’ on record (note that this is only the sixth tournament since ESPN began carrying every tournament game nationally in 2021).
As recently as 2023, the year Caitlin Clark advanced to the Women’s Final Four for the first time, the tournament was averaging 660,000 through the regional finals. In 2022, when Clark failed to make it the second round, the average was 467,000.
(Note that all prior year comparisons are skewed by Nielsen methodological changes, specifically the inclusion and expansion of its out-of-home viewing sample and shift to a new metric combining its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes.)
Last weekend’s Elite Eight games averaged 2.7 million viewers, down from 2.9 million last year and 6.2 million in ’24, but the third-highest average on record. UConn-Notre Dame led the way with a 1.7 rating and 3.08 million on ABC — on par with South Carolina-Duke last year (3.1M) — followed by Duke-UCLA at a 1.5 and 2.78 million, down from LSU-UCLA a year ago (3.4M).
Those games rank as the fourth and eighth most-watched Elite Eight contests on record.
On Monday, South Carolina-TCU drew 2.7 million on ESPN — the ninth-largest Elite Eight audience on record — preceded by Texas-Michigan 2.2 million, both down from last year’s equivalent windows (UConn-USC: 3.0M; Texas-TCU: 2.3M).
The same pattern played out in the Sweet 16, which averaged 1.6 million — down from last year (1.7M) and 2024 (2.4M) but the third-highest average on record. Texas-Kentucky led the way with a 1.3 and 2.23 million on ABC, preceded by Michigan-Louisville at a 1.2 and 2.0 million, both down from last year’s equivalent windows (Texas-Tennessee: 2.9M; TCU-Notre Dame: 2.5M). ESPN on Friday drew 2.0 million for UConn-North Carolina, up from South Carolina-Maryland last year (1.7M).
