No Caitlin Clark, no rankings historical past.
The NCAA ladies’s basketball match Ultimate 4 noticed a steep drop-off in TV rankings from final 12 months’s record-breaking viewership. With out Clark within the match, the broadcasts of UConn vs. UCLA and South Carolina vs. Texas averaged simply 3.9 million viewers for ESPN. It marked a 64% lower from the record-setting 10.8 million viewers in 2024, in keeping with Entrance Workplace Sports activities.
Nonetheless, even with out Clark, this 12 months’s Ultimate 4 was the second-most watched in historical past and was even an enchancment from the 2023 version that additionally featured Clark.
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College of Iowa Hawkeyes guard Caitlin Clark cheers as with teammates in the course of the College of Nebraska Cornhuskers sport on the Massive Ten Ladies’s Basketball Championship at Goal Heart on March 10, 2024, in Minneapolis. (Angelina Katsanis/Star Tribune through Getty Pictures)
However Clark’s recognition as a university participant helped the game peak at such historic consciousness final 12 months that the ladies’s championship sport between her Iowa workforce and Daybreak Staley’s South Carolina had higher rankings than the lads’s championship sport for the primary time ever.
With Clark within the WNBA, the professional league benefited from that surge in recognition in 2024.
Clark made the Fever the most-watched workforce within the WNBA by a landslide in her rookie 12 months, because the 14 most-watched WNBA video games of the season all included the Fever. On prime of that, she broke the document for many All-Star votes for any participant in WNBA historical past.
INSIDE CAITLIN CLARK’S IMPACT ON MEN’S BASKETBALL
Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark performs towards the Dallas Wings in Indianapolis, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Picture/Michael Conroy, File)
In early September, Clark’s Indiana Fever performed in entrance of a TV viewers of 1.26 million viewers in a sport towards the Minnesota Lynx that was performed similtaneously a Week-1 Friday evening NFL sport between the Philadelphia Eagles and Inexperienced Bay Packers.
In Clark’s first regular-season finale towards the Washington Mystics on Sept. 19, the 20,711 followers that confirmed up at Capital One Enviornment set a brand new document for the highest-attended WNBA regular-season contest.
Clark drew a WNBA document 1.84 million viewers to her first playoff sport towards the Connecticut Solar on Sept. 22, whereas competing with an NFL Sunday. She adopted it up with one other document viewers of two.54 million viewers for Sport 2.
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Caitlin Clark of the Indiana Fever talks to the media throughout an introductory press convention on April 17, 2024, at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. (Ron Hoskins/NBAE through Getty Pictures)
However after Clark’s Fever season ended, the WNBA playoffs additionally noticed a steep drop-off in viewers.
The primary sport between the Aces and Liberty, a rematch of final 12 months’s WNBA finals between two of the league’s hottest and profitable groups, drew an viewers of simply 929,000, which was 50% lower than the Fever’s Sport 1 towards the Solar.
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