There is always a sign.
Last spring, I first realized something special was happening 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 at home who, for the first time, were planning their weekend around the women’s NCAA Tournament games instead of the men’s. And every sports radio channel was talking about Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My spidey senses were tingling.
I could feel in my bones that the sport was primed for a defining moment, although I couldn’t have imagined that nearly 10 million people would tune in to the Iowa-LSU national title game, breaking the previous viewership record for a women’s national championship. basketball game. But I realized that the barrier of apathy had been broken; these women, those end-game taunts, the sport itself – it would all be talked about for days, weeks and months to come.
I have the same feeling right now.
Another great leap is coming for a sport that should get used to these advances. As we approach March Madness, it’s the women’s side of the tournament that takes center stage. It is the female stars that shine the brightest. It is the women’s game with the most intriguing stories.
And… that’s not even debatable!
“We’ve been 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 this freshman class incredibly dynamic.
“What we’re seeing is that women’s basketball is a really marketable entity. The people love it. We’re in a space where there’s an incredible amount of excitement around it. …It is something that is, really, a movement.”
We’ve seen those incredibly 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 viewership peaking at 4.45 million (!) in overtime. Clark is so ubiquitous that he was talked about several times during this year’s NBA All-Star Game weekend broadcast… while her State Farm commercials aired during breaks.
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ESPN recently announced that this was the most-watched women’s college basketball regular season in more than 15 years, with viewership up 37 percent on ESPN platforms from last season. Their SEC championship game last Sunday between LSU and South Carolina drew nearly 2 million viewers, and the Pac-12 title game the same day between USC and Stanford: the Trojans took first place and the Cardinal took second. in the next tournament. tournament: Attracted more than 1.4 million viewers, 461 percent more than last season’s championship. Those three title games surpassed three NBA weekend games.
With more eyes, fans, both new and old, feel more familiar. Now they know the stars only by name. Caitlin. Angel. Paige. Juju. Cam. Ana.
Fast! Walk into your neighborhood sports bar and ask someone to name five men’s basketball players playing this week. Can they do it? I’m not sure I’d bet a beer on that.
Recently on his podcast, KG Certified, Kevin Garnett made the same point. ““This is my first time watching college basketball and I know more girls than boys,” he said. “This is the first time we have women’s basketball ahead of men’s basketball. Women’s college basketball is… electric. “It’s ruining the guy’s game.”
Of course, that won’t matter much when we sit in our diapers or on bar stools for 14 hours straight on Thursday and 14 hours straight on Friday. We will continue to watch the men’s matches anyway, falling in love with Cinderellas despite having our brackets broken. We will be tormented by a coach’s horrendous clock management at the end of games. And we will continue to watch the men because theirs has long been the best postseason in sports.
But parity among women has changed the calculus a bit. So has the transient nature of men’s college basketball; One-and-dones, along with the transfer portal, have made it harder than ever for players to become household names across the sport on a national level. And many of the biggest male stars (their Hall of Fame coaches) have retired and left the sport under their weight.
And that has opened a door to women’s football. This is the sport with players who stay three or four years and grow before our eyes. This is the sport with its Hall of Fame coaches still leading the way (many of them recognized by their first names: Dawn, Geno, Tara, Kim) even as parity increases and college athletes evolve beneath their feet.
So this week I’ll be more interested in Clark’s final tournament and whether he can lead the Hawkeyes to another Final Four. I’ll want to see JuJu Watkins, the freshman phenom who has revitalized the USC women’s program, on the big stage for the first time. I’ll want to pretend I have half the energy in my daily life that Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo has on defense in a single game. I’ll be on pins and needles waiting to see if South Carolina can complete a perfect season after falling short a year ago.
There will undoubtedly be the typical Neanderthal takes, men still trying to claim that “no one” watches women’s basketball despite all the evidence to the contrary. Those views are now rejected by fathers who bond with their daughters by taking them to games and mothers of young children who wear Clark T-shirts and don’t think there’s anything strange about idolizing a female athlete. Those guys can hold on to their silly little stale shots that no longer make sense, while we watch exciting basketball and join this rocket ship as it soars.
“Eyes were opened last year, we fed off that momentum and it never stopped,” Notre Dame coach Niele Ivey told me Sunday. “Great teams, great players: women’s football is in fashion.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos of Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Hannah Hidalgo: Eakin Howard / Adam Bettcher / Icon Sportswire, Joseph Weiser / Icon Sportswire)
