No Caitlin Clark, no ratings history.
The NCAA women’s basketball tournament Final Four saw a steep drop-off in TV ratings from last year’s record-breaking viewership. Without Clark in the tournament, the broadcasts of UConn vs. UCLA and South Carolina vs. Texas averaged just 3.9 million viewers for ESPN. It marked a 64% decrease from the record-setting 10.8 million viewers in 2024, according to Front Office Sports.
Still, even without Clark, this year’s Final Four was the second-most watched in history and was even an improvement from the 2023 edition that also featured Clark.
But Clark’s popularity as a college player helped the sport peak at such historic awareness last year that the women’s championship game between her Iowa team and Dawn Staley’s South Carolina had better ratings than the men’s championship game for the first time ever.
With Clark in the WNBA, the pro league benefited from that surge in popularity in 2024.
Clark made the Fever the most-watched team in the WNBA by a landslide in her rookie year, as the 14 most-watched WNBA games of the season all included the Fever. On top of that, she broke the record for most All-Star votes for any player in WNBA history.
INSIDE CAITLIN CLARK’S IMPACT ON MEN’S BASKETBALL
In early September, Clark’s Indiana Fever played in front of a TV audience of 1.26 million viewers in a game against the Minnesota Lynx that was played at the same time as a Week-1 Friday night NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers.
In Clark’s first regular-season finale against the Washington Mystics on Sept. 19, the 20,711 fans that showed up at Capital One Arena set a new record for the highest-attended WNBA regular-season contest.
Clark drew a WNBA record 1.84 million viewers to her first playoff game against the Connecticut Sun on Sept. 22, while competing with an NFL Sunday. She followed it up with another record audience of 2.54 million viewers for Game 2.
But after Clark’s Fever season ended, the WNBA playoffs also saw a steep drop-off in viewers.
The first game between the Aces and Liberty, a rematch of last year’s WNBA finals between two of the league’s most popular and successful teams, drew an audience of just 929,000, which was 50% less than the Fever’s Game 1 against the Sun.
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