NCAA women’s basketball tournaments net record viewership and attendance highs

The GIST: The 2023-24 NCAA women’s basketball season was one for the books, and it’s not even over yet. Leading up to March Madness, women’s collegiate conference tournaments shattered records across the board, with the Big Ten and SEC tournaments drawing viewership in the millions. Here’s a conference breakdown before the real madness begins.

Big Ten: The Caitlin Clark Effect helped Iowa’s conference sell out its tourney to nearly 109K fans. The Iowa-Nebraska title game averaged over 3M viewers on CBS, rising to 4.45M during overtime. It was the most-watched women’s conference tournament matchup ever and the most-watched CBS women’s hoops game since a 1999 Tennessee-UConn tilt featuring Sue Bird averaged 3.9M viewers.

Pac-12: The West Coast conference welcomed 29.3K fans, its second-highest total tournament attendance in history. The title bout between USC and Stanford brought in 5.5K attendees and averaged 1.4M viewers on ESPN (a massive 462% jump YoY) for an elite rivalry between players and coaches.

• It’s a tragic swan song for the Pac-12, which will now see most of its powerhouse programs depart for other conferences. The dissolution spurred by its football programs destroyed a conference ecosystem that cultivated some of the fiercest women’s basketball competition in the nation. A bittersweet symphony.

ACC: The Ally-sponsored event was the first to reach 1.5M total attendees for a women’s hoops conference tourney, up from a record 62K in 2023. Notre Dame’s narrow championship victory over NC State drew 9.1K fans and averaged 679K viewers to become ESPN’s most-viewed ACC women’s championship ever — a steep 42% climb from last season.

SEC: The SEC tournament reset its own records as 64.K total fans visited Greenville, South Carolina, and 13.1K showed up for the title game between South Carolina and LSU. Plus, ESPN saw 2M average viewership, up 126% from 2023’s game with the same headliners.

• As the spicy rivalry between South Carolina and LSU intensifies, so does the mythic viewership around it. A regular season matchup between the two averaged 1.56M viewers on ESPN in January, beating out TNT’s Celtics-Heat game broadcast at the same time. Everyone watches women’s sports.