The Rise of Women’s Hoops
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For years now, men’s college basketball has been declining in the American viewing public. There’s just so many teams and the one and done and transfer portal mean that it’s hard to build too much loyalty toward teams. Casual fans have slipped away. March Madness is a huge exception to this, absolutely. But that has come to represent men’s college basketball and lots of fans will more or less ignore the men’s regular season until March.
But very slowly, women’s college hoops has risen. Over the last few years, it’s gotten better TV spots and there’s been big stars. Sabrina Ionescu was a great example of this and now she is a very good player with the New York Liberty and is on commercials and all that stuff. But no one has captured the nation like Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes as she has pursued the all time NCAA scoring record.
Remarkably then, in the 2023-24 season, women’s games on Fox are getting more viewers than men’s games.
Call it the Caitlin Clark Effect.
After last weekend’s massive home matchup for Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes against Ohio State, women’s college basketball is now averaging more viewers than NCAA men’s hoops on Fox networks this season.
According to Michael Mulvihill, the president of insights and analytics at Fox Sports, women’s basketball games are averaging 981,000 viewers this season compared with just 946,000 for men’s games.
Of course, to some extent this is driven by a single player, but this also wouldn’t have happened 4 years ago when Ionescu was at Oregon. It’s been building for a long time. I’m happy–watching top end women’s hoops is a very good viewing experience and it’s easy to root for all the great players on Iowa or South Carolina this year. Certainly this will dip without Clark, but not only with the WNBA ratings probably keep improving, but the women’s college ratings will have a higher floor than before.
It’s also just amazing for any women’s team sport to surpass the viewership of the same sport on the men’s side. And it’s a good sign for the game and for women’s rights and equality.