South Carolina defeated Iowa in entrance of a record-breaking nationwide viewers on Sunday.
The NCAA Ladies’s Championship delivered 18.7M viewers throughout ABC and ESPN, which marks an 89% enhance in viewership year-over-year.
Not solely is that the most-watched girls’s faculty basketball sport on file, the matchup can be the second most-watched non-Olympic girls’s sporting occasion ever on U.S. tv. It is available in behind solely the 2015 Ladies’s World Cup Remaining, in response to Nielsen knowledge.
Excluding each soccer and the Olympics, it’s ESPN’s most-watched sporting occasion since 2019. It’s additionally the community’s most-watched basketball sport throughout the board since 2019.
“With a record-setting viewers of 18.7 million viewers, Sunday’s Iowa-South Carolina title sport was a becoming finale to the most-viewed ever NCAA Ladies’s Basketball Match,” ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro mentioned in a press release. “These distinctive athletes, coaches and groups captured our consideration in unprecedented methods and it’s incumbent on all of us to maintain the unimaginable momentum going. I’m additionally very pleased with our proficient and dedicated staff for the way they offered this historic occasion.”
The spectacular championship viewers caps a girls’s faculty basketball match crammed with historic viewership.
Friday’s semifinals averaged 3.1M P18-49 viewers, up greater than 130% year-over-year. Uconn-Iowa delivered 14.2M viewers, making it the most-watched girls’s faculty basketball sport ever on the time, just for Iowa’s championship look to smash that file two days later.