When requested about what she mentioned to Caitlin Clark after Iowa’s 94-87 win over LSU within the Elite Eight recreation in Albany — a recreation that noticed the transcendent Clark rating 41 factors and tie the NCAA Match single-game document with 9 3-pointers — LSU ladies’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey mentioned, “What did I say to her? I mentioned, I positive am glad you’re leaving. I mentioned, Woman, you one thing else. By no means seen something prefer it.”
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Nobody has ever seen something like what we’re seeing proper now in terms of ladies’s school basketball viewership. Clark has shot down loads of data throughout her profession and he or she and people who performed in Monday night time’s recreation can now add this to their resume: They performed within the most-watched ladies’s school basketball recreation in historical past.
Iowa’s win over LSU averaged 12.3 million viewers and peaked at 16 million viewers. That shattered the earlier all-time mark set final yr for LSU’s win over Iowa in final yr’s championship, a recreation that averaged a document 9.9 million viewers and peaked at 12.6 million viewers.
UConn’s win over USC in Monday’s different Elite Eight matchup drew 6.7 million viewers, which might have surpassed each title recreation viewership since 1996 aside from final yr’s championship. Viewership for UConn-USC peaked at 10.4 million viewers.
Previous to final yr, the earlier document for an NCAA ladies’s basketball title recreation within the ESPN period (since 1996) was 5.68 million viewers for UConn’s title win over Oklahoma in 2002, a recreation that featured Sue Chicken and Diana Taurasi. The earlier all-time document for any ladies’s basketball recreation previous to final yr’s title recreation was 8.1 million viewers for a Virginia-Stanford nationwide semifinal on CBS in 1992.
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However all this existed in a world earlier than Clark and Co. despatched viewership to new orbits. Iowa’s win over Colorado within the Candy 16 averaged 6.9 million viewers. These are remarkable numbers within the ladies’s recreation for that spherical.
Now comes the nationwide semifinals Friday night time on ESPN. Final yr’s Iowa-South Carolina match semifinal was watched by a median of 5.5 million viewers, the most important viewers ever for a semifinal. Each semifinal video games mixed averaged 4.5 million viewers, which was the most-watched school Ultimate 4. All the 2023 Ultimate 4 weekend — together with the championship — garnered a median of 6.5 million viewers.
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This yr’s semifinals — undefeated South Carolina versus N.C. State within the early recreation adopted by Iowa in opposition to UConn — will undoubtedly shatter final yr’s Ultimate 4 document. UConn has traditionally been the game’s commonplace bearer for girls’s basketball viewership and Clark has taken the game to ranges by no means seen earlier than.
(Picture: Andy Lyons / Getty Photographs)
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Richard Deitsch is a media reporter for The Athletic. He beforehand labored for 20 years for Sports activities Illustrated, the place he coated seven Olympic Video games, a number of NCAA championships and U.S. Open tennis. Richard additionally hosts a weekly sports activities media podcast. Comply with Richard on Twitter @richarddeitsch
