The viewership of women’s basketball has been a rocket ship the last 12 months and the sport reached new regular-season viewership heights over the weekend.
The much-anticipated game Sunday between Iowa and Ohio State — which saw Iowa star Caitlin Clark score her 3,668th point to pass Pete Maravich for the most points in Division I history, men’s or women’s — averaged 3.39 million viewers on Fox. The game peaked at 4.4 million viewers. The network said Iowa-Ohio State was the most-watched regular-season women’s basketball game in 25 years since a UConn-Tennessee game in 1999 (3.88 million).
The previous women’s basketball high for this season was 1.86 million viewers for the earlier matchup between Iowa and Ohio State on NBC. Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch was the first to report the viewership. This monster number follows last year’s NCAA title game between champion LSU and Iowa, which drew 9.9 million viewers on ABC.
Sunday was Clark’s final regular-season game and Carver-Hawkeye Arena had an event feel to it with Lynette Woodard, the AIAW large-school leading scorer, in attendance along with Hall of Famer Maya Moore, Clark’s childhood idol, Nolan Ryan and Travis Scott.
Sports Media Watch said Iowa’s win topped the Warriors-Celtics game on the same day (3.01 million) and was the second most-watched sporting event of the weekend behind the NASCAR Cup Series at Las Vegas (4.36 million). The women’s basketball game was fourth for the day in the adults 18-49 demographic, trailing only Warriors-Celtics, NASCAR and ABC’s “American Idol.”
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