In March Madness, the women still have more stars and perhaps more people watching too

It’s no stretch to say the two biggest names in college basketball these days will be playing in the women’s tournament when March Madness goes into full swing later this week.

Whether the presence of Juju Watkins of USC and Paige Bueckers of UConn will overcome the game’s loss of Caitlin Clark and drive a repeat of last year’s history-making surge in viewership is among the underlying questions over the next three weeks.

One of the surest signs of the growing popularity of the women’s game came last year, when the final of the tournament, featuring Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes against coach Dawn Staley’s South Carolina juggernaut,drew more viewers than the men’s final between UConn and Purdue.

It was a first, driven in part by the fact that the men’s game wasn’t on an over-the-air network and the women’s was, but also thanks to the legion of Clark fans, many of whom have followed her to the WNBA.

“I’m hard-pressed to believe they’re going to reach the Caitlin Clark number again, because that was a comet that probably won’t be repeated this year,” Kevin Hull, a sports media professor at South Carolina, said of the 18.87 million who tuned into the women’s title game last year. “But they’re going to get a really good number again. It’s a great time to be in women’s sports.”

Besides Duke freshman Cooper Flagg, there aren’t any men’s players who can rival the numbers Bueckers or Watkins put up in what might be the most important metric in today’s world – their social media followings. Last week, in a notable transaction, Watkins became the first woman college athlete to sign an endorsement deal with Fanatics.

It’s not to say there aren’t compelling story lines in the men’s tournament. But as has often been the case, they have more to do with coaches – think, Rick Pitino at St. John’s – or programs – think Duke or North Carolina — than with individual players.

Last year’s biggest name on the men’s side was Purdue’s Zach Edey, a well-spoken but generally quiet 7-foot-4 center from Canada whose old-school post-up game sparked a fascinating debate for hardcore hoops junkies, but didn’t bring the rest of the world in.

For decades, though, none of that ever prevented the men’s tournament from outdrawing the women. Among the advantages for the men: more backing from the NCAA, a longer history as a sport and a deeper, more competitive field from 1-68, which, in turn, spawns more upsets and Cinderella stories.

Without some of those built-in advantages, the women’s game has had to embark on a slow, steady climb.

Hull believes one landmark moment was the success of the U.S. women’s soccer team in the 1990s, which “kind of changed the game when it came to all women’s sports.”

“And we’ve seen it in the years since, with the WNBA and all these other sports,” he said. “And Caitlin Clark was the right person at the right time, who just sort of turned the spark into a flame.”

The women’s tournament was already surging in popularity in 2021 (the first year ESPN broadcast every game nationally) when Sedona Prince lit a fuse with her viral video of the sparse weight room available to the players at their base in San Antonio.

It forced a reckoning with some of the longstanding inequalities between the men’s and women’s games. The most devastating was the huge disparity of the TV contracts but perhaps the best illustration of the imbalance came in the fact that the NCAA didn’t even use the “March Madness” title for the women’s tournament.

The renegotiation of the TV contract (some say for not enough), combined with Clark’s rise and a layering of some Magic-vs.-Bird-like racial tension between Clark and Angel Reese (who say they have no problem with each other) helped push popularity and viewership to the heights seen last year.

Len Elmore, the longtime player and TV analyst who now teaches sports management at Columbia, suggested the Clark vs. Reese vibe created a tension that many Americans can’t turn away from. He also said “some people like the women’s game better than the men’s game for a number of fundamental basketball reasons.”

Earlier this year, the NCAA announced that women’s teams, for the first time, would receive payments — known as “units” — for playing in March Madness.

“A lot of it has to do with us being treated like a sport now,” said Staley, whose Gamecocks are top seeded as they embark on their quest for back-to-back titles. “When you treat us like a sport, you will get a return on your investment.”

Most signs point toward last year’s ratings as part of a sustainable trend.

A matchup between Watkins and Bueckers in December averaged 2.2 million viewers, making it the second-most watched women’s game ever on Fox, behind one last season in which Clark set the NCAA scoring record. ESPN’s regular-season ratings were up 3% from last year and 41% from two seasons ago.

Next comes March Madness, where Watkins and Bueckers could face a rematch in the regional finals, while Staley and South Carolina are positioned on the other side of the bracket, setting up a possible meeting with one of them in the final on April 6.

“I’m pretty confident in saying that the days of the men’s Final Four dwarfing the women’s — double, three-times viewership – those days are long gone,” Hull said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the women’s gets more. There’s buzz now, and the TV networks are treating it as a big deal.”

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