On Tuesday afternoon, ESPN announced that the Elite Eight matchup within the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament between the Iowa Hawkeyes and LSU Tigers averaged 12.3 million viewers. The metric rendered the contest as the most-watched college basketball game of all time. Sports media senior writer Richard Deitsch prognosticated that the game would deliver large viewership numbers ahead of the start.
Before the Elite Eight game, Deitsch appeared on San Diego Sports 760 to give his perspective on the growth of women’s sports as a whole, on which he correctly predicted that the game would be the most-watched in the history of the NCAA Tournament prior to the Final Four. While Deitsch was reporting for Sports Illustrated, he had the opportunity to cover 15 iterations of the Final Four either as the reporter or principal writer. Reflecting back on his experience and comparing it to growth in the sector, he can evince palpable differences and overall progress.
“I can tell you that we are just in a new world in terms of interest,” Deitsch said. “Obviously Caitlin Clark is a very big reason for that – there’s just so much casual fan interest in her – but the viewership numbers, they don’t lie.”
Iowa ended up winning the pivotal tournament game, which peaked at 16 million viewers, securing a trip to the Final Four and subduing the LSU Tigers’ bid for a second consecutive National Championship.
Deitsch conveyed that the viewership for the tournament is up by 100% this year, which will continue to be televised by ESPN under its new eight-year media rights agreement with the NCAA. The deal, which begins this September, is worth an average of $115 million per year, according to NCAA president Charlie Baker as told to Sports Business Journal.
The National Championship Game for the 2023 NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament between Iowa and LSU averaged 9.9 million viewers and peaked at 12.6 million viewers when it was broadcast on ABC for the first time. Deitsch classified the contest, which was also available to stream on ESPN+, as “an inflection point,” explaining how there was interest in the athletic play and back and forth between Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark.
This year’s National Championship Game will return to ABC and will also be available to stream live on ESPN+, taking place on Sunday, April 7 at 3 p.m. EST. Play-by-play announcer Ryan Ruocco, color commentator Rebecca Lobo and reporter Holly Rowe will be on-site from Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse where the team to collect two victories will hoist the championship trophy.
“[ESPN has] invested a lot of money in this tournament, and they want to recoup their money from advertising, so they’re getting in better programming windows,” Deitsch said. “So you’re seeing games now on ABC where once upon a time you might have only seen those games on ESPN or ESPN2.”
ESPN revealed that the four Elite Eight games within the NCAA Women’s Championship averaged 6.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched iteration of this round of the tournament on record. Deitsch explained that the athletes within women’s college basketball have become their own brands, in part because of the changing regulations and restrictions surrounding name, image and likeness (NIL). A recent list from Sportico that Deitsch referenced delineated that seven out of the top-10 most-followed college athletes on Instagram were in women’s college basketball.
Although Deitsch believes some of the growth will be reduced when Caitlin Clark leaves the NCAA after the season to join the WNBA, he feels optimistic about the future. Show host Darren Smith stated that he does not mind discussing women’s sports on the air, but there have been times when he has received pushback.
“Will it extend to sports talk radio – like start talking about the PWHL and the NWSL? I don’t think so,” Deitsch said, “but the way I’d look at it is if it brings a little bit more people interested in different sports and if it gets let’s say somebody like you doing let’s say two segments a week or four segments a week as opposed to zero, that’s progress, and that’s where I think all of this is headed in a good direction.”
