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NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship Audience Tops Men’s For The First Time Ever

Katie Campione
·1 min read

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship delivered a bigger audience than last year, but it wasn’t enough to best the women’s title game.

UConn defeated Purdue on Monday to an audience of 14.82M viewers across TNT, TBS, and truTV, according to Nielsen. That’s a slight uptick from last year’s 14.69M, but it’s still the second lowest audience ever for the title game.

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And for the first time in history, more people tuned in to watch the women’s championship game than the men’s.

The NCAA Women’s Championship delivered 18.9M viewers across ABC and ESPN, which marks an 89% increase in viewership year-over-year.

Not only is that the most-watched women’s college basketball game on record, the matchup is also the second most-watched non-Olympic women’s sporting event ever on U.S. television. It comes in behind only the 2015 Women’s World Cup Final, according to Nielsen data.

Excluding both football and the Olympics, it is ESPN’s most-watched sporting event since 2019. It’s also the network’s most-watched basketball game across the board since 2019.

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