The NCAA girls’s-basketball season formally concluded a banner season on Sunday with breathless drama, regardless that it wasn’t a shock ending.
In a season stocked with unprecedented highs, the closely favored College of South Carolina Gamecocks gained the nationwide championship over the College of Iowa. A slew of viewing data had been set as tens of millions witnessed your entire sport attain a brand new zenith due to the large reputation of the Iowa famous person Caitlin Clark, the Gamecocks’ dominance, and the dynamic personalities of Louisiana State College.
However now what?
Clark’s good school profession is now over. She is the presumed prime choose in subsequent week’s WNBA draft. South Carolina is etched within the document books because the tenth program in Division I historical past to finish an undefeated season and the fifth program in girls’s-college-basketball historical past to win three nationwide titles. And Angel Reese of LSU—who misplaced her bid for a second straight nationwide championship after Clark’s Iowa beat her staff within the Elite Eight—is shifting on to the WNBA, the place she is predicted to be a lottery choose.
Ladies on this sport have been instructed for many years that if they simply give individuals a incredible product to look at, charismatic personalities, and compelling storylines, then they are going to be rewarded with the identical consideration and funding that has been computerized for the boys. It’s the outdated chicken-or-the-egg argument, nevertheless it hasn’t mattered whether or not the ladies are the rooster or the egg—the funding hasn’t matched the standard of the product the ladies have offered.
Issues need to be totally different now. This was presumably the best girls’s-college-basketball season ever, as evidenced by the blockbuster scores delivered on this yr’s NCAA match. For the primary time, extra individuals watched the ladies’s nationwide championship recreation than the boys’s, marking the third time over the course of the week that the ladies set a television-ratings document. It was the pure punctuation to a season during which audiences for girls’s video games jumped 37 % throughout ESPN platforms, and ladies’s-basketball video games on Fox networks averaged extra viewers than the boys.
After final yr’s national-championship recreation between LSU and Iowa garnered a then-record 9.9 million viewers, there was some skepticism about whether or not the ladies may proceed to ship those self same gigantic scores. As an alternative, they did even higher. Final week’s much-hyped rematch between Iowa and LSU drew 12.3 million viewers. 4 days later, greater than 14 million individuals watched Clark bounce the perennial energy College of Connecticut from the NCAA match. After which for Sunday’s championship recreation, the ladies delivered a ranking that’s extra more likely to be related to the NFL. The South Carolina–Iowa recreation averaged 18.7 million viewers.
Not solely was the ultimate the most-watched girls’s-basketball recreation of all time and the most-watched basketball recreation total since 2019, however these video games delivered extra viewers than final yr’s NBA Finals and all however 4 college-football video games throughout the 2023 season.
“It’s a second, like individuals are saying, nevertheless it’s greater than a second, you recognize?” Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma instructed reporters. “Typically moments change into minutes, and minutes change into hours, and hours change into days. And the subsequent factor you recognize, it turns into a part of the nationwide pastime.”
Sadly each time these moments have occurred previously, they didn’t essentially drive the NCAA and the media to provide the ladies the required sources and a focus. In 1983, the basketball legend Cheryl Miller of the College of Southern California made her debut on nationwide tv towards Louisiana Tech, the primary girls’s-basketball staff to win an NCAA nationwide championship, the yr earlier than. With the championship on the road, the Trojans beat the Girl Techsters—sure, they had been known as that then—and Miller gained her first title as an electrifying USC freshman. Airing on CBS, the sport attracted practically 12 million viewers.
It will have been an ideal alternative for the group to raise a signature girls’s sport. All of the substances had been there—a dynamic participant in a serious media market (Los Angeles), and a dominant rival. However slightly than construct on the success, the NCAA spent years prioritizing, selling, and cultivating the boys’s-basketball match.
These weren’t the one alternatives to nurture the ladies’s recreation and put it on par with the boys. In 1995, the ladies’s national-title recreation between Connecticut and then-rival College of Tennessee attracted 7.4 million viewers, again when the ladies’s Ultimate 4 aired solely on CBS. The next yr, the ladies’s nationwide basketball staff gained gold on the Olympics in Atlanta. Then ESPN took over the NCAA match as a part of a seven-year, $19 million deal, increasing the competitors’s attain. And though ESPN actually deserves credit score for serving to amplify the ladies’s recreation, final yr was the primary time the community determined to air the championship recreation on ABC, which performed an enormous function within the scores explosion.
Ladies’s basketball’s battle to realize its personal territory has been a rewarding one. In 1997, the WNBA made its debut, however as the sport grew in viewership and expertise, the NCAA appeared sluggish to make adjustments that will speed up that development. It wasn’t till three years in the past that the NCAA determined to model the ladies’s match with its well-known advertising slogan “March Insanity,” as soon as reserved for the boys. The ladies’s match area additionally was lastly expanded to 68 groups in 2021—a decade after the boys had carried out it.
However these adjustments didn’t come as a result of the NCAA realized what it had. They got here as a result of the NCAA acquired publicly embarrassed. In 2021, each the boys’s and ladies’s tournaments had been carried out in bubble environments due to the coronavirus pandemic. A number of girls’s gamers and directors on the NCAA match known as out the group on social media for the apparent disparities in weight-room amenities. The boys’s gamers got an unlimited, well-stocked gymnasium befitting prime athletes, whereas the ladies got solely a tiny rack for dumbbells and some yoga mats. The NCAA apologized after receiving a barrage of criticism, however the optics had been so disastrous that it was pressured into commissioning an outdoor agency to conduct a gender-equity evaluate.
The evaluation revealed that “the NCAA’s broadcast agreements, company sponsorship contracts, distribution of income, organizational construction, and tradition all prioritize Division I males’s basketball over the whole lot else in ways in which create, normalize, and perpetuate gender inequities.” The report additionally famous that the price range for the 2019 males’s-basketball match was greater than double that of the ladies’s, feeding the notion that the boys had been “worthy of elevated funding.”
The analysis estimated that the annual broadcast rights for girls’s basketball can be value $81 million to $112 million in 2025. Earlier this yr, the NCAA reached an eight-year, $920 million deal with ESPN that provides the sports activities community unique rights to 40 championships, together with girls’s basketball. That interprets to $65 million a yr for the match, which appears like the perfect worth in sports activities when you think about that CBS and Turner Sports activities are paying the NCAA $870 million a yr to broadcast the boys’s-basketball match.
No person was stunned to be taught that the NCAA wasn’t precisely residing as much as its guarantees to spice up the ladies’s recreation. However maybe one of many extra necessary conclusions from the evaluate is that the NCAA was severely undervaluing the ladies’s-college-basketball match. Ladies are consistently blamed for the game’s shortcomings, when in actual fact they’ve been undermined from the very starting. In the meantime, the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League signed a cross-platform media-rights deal in November value $240 million, which is the biggest media deal in girls’s-sports historical past. That quantity is 40 instances greater than the earlier deal.
Though it may be tough evaluating professionals to school athletes, the most-watched match the ladies’s-soccer league has ever performed was the 2022 championship, which averaged 915,000 viewers. That very same yr, the UConn–South Carolina recreation attracted practically 5 million viewers, the most important ranking for the title recreation in nearly 20 years. And this was earlier than the title recreation made its current return to community tv.
Some have speculated that the NCAA erred in not negotiating a separate tv deal for girls’s basketball.
“We want extra networks to compete for our abilities,” Daybreak Staley, South Carolina’s head coach, stated in November. “And I don’t know if that’s occurring, however I hope that’s occurring within the close to future.”
Caitlin Clark has drastically moved the needle in girls’s basketball, and there are such a lot of encouraging indicators that the sport gained’t lose steam together with her departure to the WNBA. Ladies’s basketball is more healthy than it’s ever been. South Carolina is dropping its greatest participant, Kamilla Cardoso, to the WNBA draft, however the bulk of the staff returns subsequent yr to defend its nationwide title and proceed its dynasty. JuJu Watkins, the USC’s blazing freshman guard, was the second-leading scorer in Division I girls’s basketball, behind Clark. Watkins annihilated Clark’s freshman scoring document by 121 factors and took the Trojans to the Elite Eight. And with USC shifting to the Massive Ten convention, Watkins is poised to change into one of many recreation’s largest stars, together with freshmen Hannah Hidalgo of Notre Dame and MiLaysia Fulwiley of South Carolina.
The outstanding development of the school recreation has sparked a number of hypothesis as as to whether that development will translate to the WNBA, whose season begins Could 14. Already, there are indicators that considerations the Clark impact gained’t carry over are unfounded. Ticket gross sales for the Indiana Fever—Clark’s probably staff—have skilled an astounding 136 % improve. Additionally, 36 of the Fever’s 40 video games will likely be televised nationally, giving followers a possibility to immerse themselves within the star energy the remainder of the league provides.
The underside line is that the ladies have carried out their half by offering loads of charming causes for the sport to thrive. It’s only a matter of whether or not the gatekeepers will allow them to down once more.
