No Caitlin Clark, no history of ratings.
The Final Four of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament experienced a lowered television rating compared to the record hearing last year. Without Clark in the tournament, UCONN’s emissions against UCLA and South Carolina against Texas have only reached 3.9 million viewers for ESPN. He marked a decrease of 64% compared to viewers of 10.8 million records in 2024, according to the Front Office Sports.
However, even without Clark, the final Four of this year was the second more watched in history and was even an improvement compared to the 2023 edition which also featured Clark.
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The goalkeeper of the Iowa Hawkeyes Caitlin Clark Applaudie University as with the teammates during the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers match at the Big Ten Women’s Basketball Championship at the Target Center on March 10, 2024, in Minneapolis. (Angelina Katsanis / Star Tribune via Getty Images)
But the popularity of Clark as a college player helped sport to such a historic conscience last year that the female championship match between his Iowa team and the South Carolina of Dawn Staley had better ratings than the male championship match for the first time.
With Clark in the WNBA, the professional league benefited from this vague popularity in 2024.
Clark made fever the most watched team in the WNBA by a landslide His recruit yearBecause the 14 most watched WNBA games of the season all included the fever. In addition to that, she broke the record for most stars votes for any player in the history of WNBA.
Inside the impact of Caitlin Clark on male basketball
The Indiana Caitlin Clark fever guard plays against the Dallas wings in Indianapolis on September 15, 2024. (AP photo / Michael Conroy, file)
At the beginning of September, Clark’s fever in Indiana played in front of a television audience of 1.26 million viewers in a match against the Lynx of Minnesota which was played at the same time as a match of the week-1 Friday evening between the Eagles of Philadelphia and Green Bay Packers.
In the first final of the Clark regular season against Washington’s mystics on September 19, the 20,711 fans who presented themselves in Capital Onena set a new record for the most popular WNBA season competition.
Clark designed a WNBA record 1.84 million viewers in its first eliminatory match against Connecticut Sun on September 22, while competing with a NFL Sunday. She followed with another record audience of 2.54 million viewers for match 2.
Caitlin Clark of Indiana Fever speaks to the media at an introductory press conference on April 17, 2024, in Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. (Ron Hoskins / NBAE via Getty Images)
But after the end of the Clark fever season, the WNBA qualifiers also saw a steep drop in viewers.
The first match between the Aces and Liberty, a revenge match of the WNBA finals from last year between two of the most popular and successful teams in the League, attracted an audience of only 929,000, which was 50% less than match 1 of the fever against the sun.
