It was even bigger than we thought.
On Tuesday, Nielsen released official ratings data for Sunday's women's college basketball championship game, revealing that South Carolina's victory over Iowa averaged 18.9 million viewers, slightly more than ESPN's preliminary tally released Monday.
The outsized performance of the ESPN-ABC simulcast made the game not only the biggest women's basketball TV event ever, breaking a one-week-old record of 12.3 million viewers established by Iowa's women's tournament semifinal win over LSU on April 1, it produced the biggest TV audience for hoops of any kind — men’s or women’s, college or pro — since the 2019 men’s college title game. (Nearly 23 million viewers, on average, watched Virginia beat Texas Tech in overtime that year.)
This year’s women's title game doubled the audience of last year's women's championship matchup between Iowa and LSU, which averaged a previous all-time high 9.915 million viewers.
The NBA has drawn bigger TV audiences, but not for some time. Last year's five-game Finals matchup, featuring the Denver Nuggets beating the Miami Heat in five games, averaged 11.64 million viewers for ABC.
Notably, Monday night's men's college basketball championship game featuring University of Connecticut beating Purdue averaged 14.8 million viewers on CBS.
The catalyst for the women's games surge in popularity has been Iowa star player Caitlin Clark, who averaged 28.43 points per game this season and drove consumption of women's college basketball to previously unimagined levels.
Clark will now take her talents to the WNBA, which averaged 627,000 viewers for ABC last season, the best performance for the league in 11 years.
