Women outdraw the men in March Madness ratings for the first time ever

March Madness is a TV juggernaut, particularly in the United States.

Sports fans fill out brackets annually as they follow the men’s NCAA tournament that crowns college basketball’s national champion.

But there’s also a women’s tournament, though television numbers for the men always crush the ratings the women pull in.

But not this year.

For the first time ever, the national championship game for the women actually outdrew the men.

An average of 18.9 million viewers in the United States tuned into the women’s final to see the South Carolina Gamecocks beat the Iowa Hawkeyes 87-75 on ABC and ESPN. The audience peaked at 24 million viewers, according to ESPN.

The men, by contrast, drew just 14.8 million for Monday’s final, which saw the University of Connecticut Huskies defeat the Purdue Boilermakers 75-60 on TBS, TNT, and TruTV.

Last night's UConn-Purdue national championship game averaged 14.8 million viewers.

That means the women's national championship game had more viewers than the men's for the first time ever.

• UConn-Purdue: 14.8 million
• Iowa-South Carolina: 18.9 million

That's incredible. pic.twitter.com/RdNOxwKHmh

— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) April 9, 2024

Interest in the women’s game has taken a meteoric rise in recent years, as the graph below shows. Ratings for Sunday’s final represent an 89% increase over last year’s women’s final and a 285% increase over the 2022 title game.

The ratings boom has coincided with the rise of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, the 22-year-old superstar who has broken NCAA scoring records and will be picked first overall in the upcoming WNBA Draft.

This chart would have been unimaginable just a few years ago pic.twitter.com/hFF5dj5Rmg

— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) April 9, 2024

Sunday’s women’s final was the most watched sporting event of any kind, excluding football and the Olympics, since 2019.

Interest in women’s hockey is also on the rise with the success of the Professional Women’s Hockey League. In its inaugural season, the PWHL reported in March that it averaged 5,235 fans per game. That’s more than the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes pull in each game at their tiny arena in Tempe.

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