You don’t have to inform ESPN senior vice president of production Meg Aronowitz about the challenge of producing the women’s NCAA Tournament without Caitlin Clark the year after she had galvanized the property to NFL viewership heights.
You never want to be the guy that follows Nick Saban, right? There is an interesting duality with the women’s tournament this year. The sport is as hot as ever and includes stars in every corner of America from USC’s JuJu Watkins to UConn’s Paige Bueckers to Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo to Texas’ Madison Booker. Regular-season games were up 3 percent year-over-year across all of ESPN properties — and up an eye-popping 41 percent over 2023. But it will be nearly impossible for ESPN to match last year’s title game viewership between South Carolina and Iowa, a game that averaged an astonishing 18.9 million viewers and peaked at 24.1 million viewers. That was a 90 percent increase from the 2023 title game and a 289 percent increase from 2022 — a unicorn among unicorn ratings.
It is extremely healthy where women’s college basketball is, but it would take a miracle for the women’s title game to get 19 million viewers again, said Aronowitz, the point person for ESPN’s women’s basketball coverage. It’s not beyond reason for it to get 12 million if we get the right teams, the right momentum and the right storylines. What we are going to do is make sure that as the audience grows with us from the Selection Show through Tampa, we keep the audience engaged as long as we possibly can.
But we also have to manage expectations, she continued. There is no Caitlin Clark, but there are a lot of incredible student-athletes that we’re going to showcase throughout this tournament, and maybe one of them sets fire and becomes a national sensation. That would be great. We’re going to tell the best stories we can, we’re going to document the games, and we’re going to put the best basketball coverage that we can possibly do on television.
I’ve written plenty of media-centric women’s basketball pieces over the years and was fortunate to cover women’s college basketball for Sports Illustrated for many years. What’s been particularly evident over the past five years are the resources added by ESPN — a sign that the tournament is a money-maker. AdAge reported the tournament’s total ad sales are up 200 percent from last year alone, and a 30-second ad unit for the championship game is going for around $1 million.
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