For the second-straight game, Caitlin Clark and Iowa played in front of the largest women’s college basketball audience on record.
Friday’s Iowa-UConn NCAA women’s basketball tournament national semifinal averaged a 7.1 rating and 14.43 million viewers across ESPN (6.9, 13.91M), ESPN2 (0.27, 505K) and ESPN Deportes (0.00, 10K), surpassing Iowa-LSU in the Elite Eight four days earlier (12.3M) as the largest NCAA women’s basketball audience ever recorded by Nielsen.
The 7.1 rating is the highest for a women’s game since the first national championship in 1982, Louisiana Tech-Cheyney State on CBS (7.3).
The Hawkeyes’ win delivered the third-largest basketball audience — college or pro, men or women — in the past two years, trailing last Sunday’s NC State-Duke men’s regional final (15.1M) and last year’s UConn-San Diego State men’s national title game (14.7M). On the ESPN networks specifically, it was the most-watched basketball game since Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals (Raptors-Warriors: 18.6M).
It also delivered the tenth-largest basketball audience ever on cable — behind seven games in the NCAA men’s Final Four and Game 7 of the 2016 and 2018 NBA Western Conference Finals (Thunder-Warriors: 16.0M; Warriors-Rockets: 14.8M) — and the third-largest non-football audience ever on ESPN behind a pair of 2014 men’s World Cup matches (USMNT-Portugal: 18.2M; Belgium-USMNT: 16.5M). (If one includes pre-match coverage for the 2014 matches, Friday’s game topped both.)
Keep in mind that out-of-home viewing was not tracked in Nielsen final nationals prior to 2020, meaning that games such as Cavaliers-Celtics Game 7 on ESPN in 2018 (13.6M) would likely rank ahead all things being equal.
While the record audience for Iowa-UConn is the overarching headline, the more encouraging figure long-term may have been for South Carolina-NC State earlier in the night. South Carolina’s comfortable win over a low-profile Wolfpack squad averaged a 3.7 and 7.17 million viewers across ESPN (3.6, 6.87M), ESPN2 (0.16, 294K) and ESPN Deportes (0.00, 6K), trailing only Iowa-UConn and a Virginia-Stanford game on CBS in 1992 (8.1M) as the most-watched national semifinal on record.
For one indication of how much viewership has grown for the women’s game, the last time NC State played in the Final Four — 1998 — their loss to Louisiana Tech averaged a 0.8 and 999,000 on ESPN.
Together, the semifinal games averaged a 5.5 and 11.0 million viewers — more-than-double last year. Iowa-UConn increased 140% in ratings and 152% in viewership from Iowa-South Carolina last year, which at the time was the most-watched national semifinal since 1992 (3.0, 5.63M). South Carolina-NC State doubled last year’s LSU-Virginia Tech game (1.8, 3.44M).
Source link : https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2024/04/iowa-uconn-record-audience-14-2-million-viewers-espn-final-four/
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Publish date : 2024-04-05 03:00:00
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