There is always a sign.
Last spring, I first noticed something special was going on when I couldn’t walk half a block in Dallas without running into large groups of Iowa or South Carolina fans. There were also my friends back home who, for the first time, were planning their weekend around the women’s NCAA tournament games instead of the men’s. And all the sports radio channels were talking about Kaitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My mysterious senses were tingling.
I felt in my bones that the sport was primed for a momentous moment, though I could not have imagined that nearly 10 million people would tune in for the Iowa-LSU national title game, shattering the previous viewership record for a women’s game. basketball game. But I could tell that the barrier of apathy had been broken. these women, this mocking of the final games, the sport itself — everything would be talked about for days, weeks and months.
I feel the same way right now.
Another huge jump is coming for a sport that should be getting used to these gains. As we head into March Madness, the women’s side of the tournament is taking center stage. It is the women’s stars that shine the brightest. It’s the women’s game with the most interesting stories.
And… that’s not even debatable!
“We’re on a steady incline,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said during my SiriusXM show Sunday night. “You combine the star power in our game, the fact that you have some of these established stars that fans have really built a relationship with, like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink — and then you add to that incredibly dynamic freshman class.
“What we’re seeing is that women’s basketball is a really marketable entity. People love it. We are in a space where there is incredible excitement around it. … It’s something that is, really, a movement.”
We’ve seen those insanely long lines of fans waiting to get into arenas – any arena – to see Clark play. More than 3 million people watched Clark’s Hawkeyes beat Nebraska in overtime in the Big Ten championship game on CBS, with the audience reaching 4.45 million (!) in overtime. Clark is so ubiquitous that she was talked about multiple times during this year’s NBA All-Star Weekend broadcast … while her State Farm commercials aired during her breaks.
GO DEEPER
Like Steph and Jimmer before her, Caitlin Clark is a “once in a lifetime” experience.
ESPN recently announced that this was its most-watched women’s college basketball regular season in more than 15 years, with viewership up 37 percent across ESPN platforms from last season. Last Sunday’s SEC championship between LSU and South Carolina drew nearly 2 million viewers, and the Pac-12 title game on the same day between USC and Stanford — the Trojans are the No. 1 seed and the Cardinal a No. 2 seed in the upcoming tournament — drew more 1.4 million viewers, a 461 percent increase from last season’s championship. Those three title games topped the weekend’s three NBA games.
With more eyeballs comes increased familiarity for fans young and old. Now, they only know the stars by their first name. Caitlin. Angel. Paige. Spell. Cam. Hannah.
Quickly! Go to your neighborhood sports bar and ask someone to name five men’s basketball players playing this week. Can they do it? Not sure I’d bet a beer on that.
Recently on his podcast, KG Certified, Kevin Garnett made the same point. “This is the first time I’ve watched college basketball where I know more girls than boys,” he said. “It’s the first time we’ve had women’s basketball ahead of men’s basketball. Women’s college basketball is … electric. It blows the man’s game out of the water.”
Of course, that won’t matter much when we’re sitting on couches or bar stools for 14 straight hours on Thursday and 14 straight hours on Friday. We’ll watch the men’s games just the same, falling in love with the Cinderellas even though they spoiled us. We will agonize over a coach’s terrible clock management late in the game. And we’ll keep watching the men because theirs has long been the best postseason in sports.
But parity on the women’s side has changed the calculus a bit. So is the transient nature of men’s college basketball. The one-and-dones coupled with the transfer gate have made it harder than ever for players to become household names across the sport at national level. And so many of the men’s biggest stars — the Hall of Fame coaches — have retired and left the sport without its weight.
And that opened a door for the women’s game. This is the sport with players who stay three or four years and grow up before our eyes. This is the sport with Hall of Fame coaches still leading the way — many recognized by name: Dawn, Geno, Tara, Kim — even as parity rises and college sports evolves beneath their feet.
So this week, I’ll be more interested in Clark’s latest tournament run and whether he can take the Hawkeyes to another Final Four. I’d like to see JuJu Watkins, the freshman phenom who has revitalized the USC women’s program, on the big stage for the first time. I’m going to want to pretend I have half the energy in my day-to-day life that Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo does on defense in a single game. I’ll be on pins and needles waiting to see if South Carolina can pull off a perfect season after falling just short a year ago.
No doubt there will be the usual Neanderthal tests, men still trying to claim that “no one” watches women’s basketball despite all evidence to the contrary. Those views are now being shot down by dads who bond with their daughters by taking them to games and moms of little boys who wear Clark jerseys and don’t think there’s anything weird about idolizing a female athlete. These men can cling to their silly little outdated fists that no longer make sense while we watch exciting basketball and join this rocket ship as it rises.
“Eyes were opened last year, and we just fueled that momentum, and it never stopped,” Notre Dame coach Niele Ivey told me Sunday. “Great teams, great players – the women’s game is just hot.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athlete; Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Hannah Hidalgo Photos: Eakin Howard / Adam Bettcher / Icon Sportswire, Joseph Weiser / Icon Sportswire)
