Iowa’s Caitlin Clark has taken the game by storm as ratings and interest soar.getty images
A teary-eyed Kenny Brooks sat behind the microphone following Virginia Tech’s 80-75 loss to in-state rival Virginia on March 3.
Brooks, who guided the Hokies to the 2023 Final Four, had water welling in his eyes as he started to expound on the growth of the women’s basketball product in recent years and the state record-breaking crowd of 11,975 that watched Virginia’s preeminent programs battle that evening.
“I watch the women’s game get disrespected by people who have no idea how much work these kids put in,” Brooks said. “It’s finally being recognized for what it should be — a beautiful sport, kids who work their asses off, kids who have so much pride in what they do.”
Women’s basketball is having a moment in 2024. Iowa star Caitlin Clark has drawn massive crowds wherever she’s gone. The sport is seemingly shattering its own television records on a weekly basis. The NCAA’s recently announced media rights deal with ESPN, too, saw a nearly 3x increase over the last contract due, in large part, to the growth of the women’s game.
As the NCAA women’s basketball tournament nears, these are just a few of the business storylines worth tracking as postseason play begins next week:
The Clark Effect
Caitlin Clark has brought the crowds. The NCAA women’s tournament should bring more.
Clark is literally everywhere these days. Yes, she’s still spotting up from the logo in Iowa City, but her use of name, image and likeness has led to major endorsement deals with companies like Gatorade, Nike and State Farm, among others.
The impact has been real. The Hawkeyes are responsible for the four most-watched women’s basketball games this year and five of the top eight. The March 3 game between Iowa and Ohio State on Fox also marked the best women’s basketball regular-season viewership number since 1999.
“The amount of interest in her is incredible,” Mike Bucklin, Fox Sports senior vice president of digital, said recently. “You’re always looking to build those stars. It’s the reason people watch. … On the digital side, we know that anything we do with Caitlin Clark has a built-in audience. She raises the floor. A lot of our ideas start with, ‘What is something cool we can do with Caitlin Clark?’”
The postseason fervor around Clark, who just broke Pete Maravich’s all-time NCAA scoring record, and Iowa has already started (her recent announcement that this will be her final season in college has aided the anticipation). The Big Ten announced on Feb. 23 all-session tickets for the women’s league tournament had sold out for the first time in the history of the event. Clark’s final contest in Iowa City saw tickets starting near the $400 mark on the secondary market.
If the Hawkeyes make another deep run this March, expect sites featuring Clark’s squad to be as hot a ticket as anywhere in the country.
South Carolina’s Dawn Staley has her team at the top again.getty images
Blockbuster potential
Last year’s Final Fours were convenient with the men facing off in Houston and the women down the road in Dallas. This year, the events will be held virtually a world away with the women taking center stage in Cleveland and the men heading to Phoenix. In theory, the setup might give the Women’s Final Four a chance to hit big-time marks and showcase itself independent of any other happenings in the sports world.
Last year’s Women’s Final Four shattered records. Clark’s involvement certainly helped, as the Iowa-LSU national title game drew 9.9 million viewers on ABC compared to the men’s championship between UConn and San Diego State, which pulled in 14.69 million on CBS. The LSU-Iowa contest was also the first women’s basketball title game aired on broadcast TV under the current media rights agreement with Disney/ESPN, which went into effect prior to the 1996 tournament.
The defending champion Tigers, who reached No. 8 in last week’s Associated Press Top 25 poll, and Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks will be trendy picks as the NCAA Tournament gets underway. They, too, figure to bring major numbers if they collide at any point (their January matchup in Baton Rouge drew 1.6 million viewers on ESPN).
“When you think about just utopia — what does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? [South Carolina-LSU] had all the dynamics of what you want every women’s basketball player to experience,” Staley said at the time. “We do that at our place at South Carolina, and they do that at LSU. They do that at Iowa.”
Ratings explosion
The NCAA women’s tournament has seen major growth in viewership. This March should be no different.
Can the 2024 tournament be a showcase for women’s basketball post-NCAA media deal?
The NCAA’s landmark media rights deal with ESPN announced in January was greeted largely with applause — albeit, detractors existed. The biggest complaint centered on why the NCAA chose not to package women’s basketball as its own entity, considering it was among the most valued pieces of the deal worth $115 million annually ($920 million total).
“If you were to unbundle, the top of the package would be grabbed by everybody,” said Hillary Mandel, executive vice president and head of Americas for media at IMG, who consulted on the deal alongside Karen Brodkin, executive vice president and co-head of WME Sports.
“But what would happen to everybody else? That’s not who the NCAA is. They don’t want to leave anybody behind.”
NCAA President Charlie Baker said at the time women’s basketball itself was valued at $65 million annually, or roughly 56% of the total value of the media rights included in this package. Consider the entire last deal signed with ESPN in 2011 was only worth about $40 million annually, and that’s a huge jump in value.
What comes next remains to be seen. As noted, women’s basketball has seen huge upticks in viewership over the last handful of years. The 2024 NCAAs could be huge, particularly if Clark and some of the other major brands dominating the sport these days are involved.
Should the exponential growth of the sport continue, there may be those who look back on the deal in a few years and think ESPN received a discount rate. For now, though, the growth is what matters — and it hasn’t shown signs of slowing.
Consider that and this deal a win.
