Easter Sunday continues to fuel milestone sports viewership, as the NCAA women’s basketball national championship entered rare territory despite an all-time blowout.
Sunday’s UCLA-South Carolina NCAA women’s basketball national championship averaged a 3.9 rating and 9.88 million viewers across the main telecast on ABC and an alternate presentation on ESPN and ESPNU (771K), trailing only the two appearances by Caitlin Clark’s Iowa squad — against LSU in 2023 (5.2, 9.92M) and South Carolina the following year (9.3, 18.87M) — as the most-watched women’s national title game of the Nielsen people meter era (1989-present).
The Bruins’ blowout win, which peaked with 10.7 million viewers, was a mixed bag compared to last year’s similarly-lopsided matchup of UConn and South Carolina. Ratings declined 9% from a 4.3, but viewership increased 15% from 8.6 million.
The game was no doubt helped by airing on Easter Sunday, which has become a high-viewing holiday in the six years since Nielsen began tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates. In the six Easter holidays since the out-of-home era began, the holiday has produced decade-plus highs for the opening weekend of the NBA Playoffs (2022 and 2025), a five-year high for the final round of the Masters (2023) and a five-year high for the NCAA Men’s Elite Eight (2024).
In addition, viewership almost certainly benefited from the same Nielsen methodological changes — the expansion of its out-of-home viewing sample and shift to a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes — that have boosted sports audiences nearly across the board over the past year.
Between the holiday and the methodological changes, it is highly possible that viewership would have been below last year’s levels all things being equal. One need only look at the fact that the household rating — which by definition does not include out out-of-home viewing — declined.
Nevertheless, between the historic rout (UCLA led by as many as 35) and relatively low-profile matchup, few could have reasonably expected the game to do well enough for those factors to matter. One can only wonder how high viewership would have climbed if not for the lopsided margin.
It should be noted that Friday’s national semifinals posted steeper gains, obviously without the benefit of the Easter holiday. South Carolina-UConn averaged a 2.5 and 5.4 million (+47%) and UCLA-Texas a 2.5 and 5.0 million (+19%), with the two-game average of 5.2 million trailing only 2024 as the highest for the event since it began airing on ESPN in 1996.
The two games rank fourth and fifth among national semifinals in the ESPN era.
