In case you are studying this, you seemingly know who Paige Bueckers is. Perhaps you might be additionally aware of Lauren Betts, Maddie Booker and MiLaysia Fulwiley.
However Meg Aronowitz, a senior vice chairman of manufacturing for ESPN and the corporate’s level particular person for its girls’s basketball protection, can’t afford to make the same supposition. When the ladies’s Last 4 video games air on Friday (7 p.m. ET and 9:30 p.m. ET), she and her ESPN colleagues need to cater, no less than partly, to the informal viewer who would possibly watch just one or two girls’s basketball video games annually.
“That is the a part of the match the place we have now to completely remind ourselves that that is a wholly new viewers becoming a member of us,” Aronowitz stated. “I do know that that sounds very TV cliche, however we have now to show them who these stars are. I inform my individuals — repeat your finest stuff. New viewers are tuning in each spherical, and we have now to ensure that we’re giving individuals a purpose to come back again on Sunday for the title sport.”
We have now reached probably the most fascinating a part of this match so far as a media-centric examination. Why? Due to final 12 months’s outlier viewership. ESPN executives know that it is going to be unimaginable to duplicate the Last 4 viewership numbers from a 12 months in the past — and that may be a direct results of Caitlin Clark not being on this match. Iowa’s win over UConn within the nationwide semifinals set a then-new file for the most-watched girls’s faculty basketball sport in historical past with a median of 14.2 million viewers. It was finally topped by the 18.9 million viewers who watched the title sport between Iowa and South Carolina. Sure, there are many fashionable gamers in girls’s basketball however just one viewership unicorn — that child from Iowa with limitless vary.
However this 12 months’s numbers current knowledge factors that talk to the expansion of ladies’s faculty basketball writ massive. The Elite Eight video games averaged 2.9 million viewers, the second most-watched Elite Eight spherical on file, solely behind the Clark-infused (6.2 million viewers) numbers from final 12 months. Elite Eight video games in 2025 have been up 34 p.c from 2023. ESPN stated 4 of the highest 10 Elite Eight video games on file aired this 12 months, together with:
• LSU-UCLA (3.4 million viewers, No. 3 Elite Eight sport all-time)
• Duke-SC (3.1 million, No. 4)
• UConn-USC (3.0 million, No. 6)
• TCU-Texas (2.3 million, No. 9)
The Candy 16 spherical averaged 1.7 million viewers throughout ESPN’s networks, the second-most-watched Candy 16 on file behind final 12 months (which averaged 2.4 million viewers) and up 39 p.c from 2023. This 12 months delivered 4 of the highest 10 Candy 16 video games of all time, together with 2.9 million for Tennessee-Texas (No. 3) and a couple of.5 million for Notre Dame-TCU (No. 4).
The second spherical of the ladies’s match averaged 982,000 viewers, the second-most-watched second spherical on file behind the 1.4 million viewer common final 12 months. It was up 60 p.c from 2023.
The primary spherical of the ladies’s match averaged 367,000 viewers. That’s down 22 p.c from 471,000 final 12 months (as anticipated with out Clark) however up 43 p.c from 2023.
Heading into the Last 4, all video games have averaged 967,000 viewers, up 47 p.c from 2023.
“Folks got here to the ladies’s Last 4 final 12 months as a result of they wished to see what Caitlin Clark would do,” Aronowitz stated. “Nevertheless it wasn’t simply the Iowa video games that have been score. The complete match rated for us, and it’s our job to ensure that we proceed to inform the tales of the groups and these student-athletes and provides individuals a purpose to stay round.”
ESPN will focus a ton this weekend on Bueckers as a result of stars draw individuals in. The UConn star had 40 factors within the Candy 16 win over Oklahoma and 31 factors towards USC on Monday. She is averaging 29 factors per sport within the match.
We’ll by no means know, given the devastating ACL harm to USC star JuJu Watkins, however you possibly can think about that the Elite Eight sport that includes a wholesome Watkins and Bueckers may need turn into the most-watched Elite Eight sport in historical past.
“Everyone’s speaking about Paige,” stated Aronowitz. “It’s not ‘Paige Bueckers.’ It’s simply ‘Paige.’ Whenever you get to that time the place you might be first identify solely, that’s when you understand, wow, persons are beginning to concentrate. The story that comes alongside together with her, the entire accidents, the enjoying via COVID and the resilience of this younger girl, that’s a narrative that may get individuals to wish to watch. So we’re thrilled to have Paige in Tampa.”
(For followers of Watkins, Aronowitz stated that ESPN’s girls’s basketball group goes to make it a spotlight to doc her return. Mentioned Aronowitz: “We’re going to doc her journey to restoration, and we will’t wait until there’s a time the place she’s acquired a spring in her step and he or she’s again out on the courtroom and we get to have the ability to discuss her success and restoration.”)
As ESPN has seen extra success with the ladies’s Last 4, the funding in expertise will increase. Aronowitz stated this 12 months’s Last 4 might be in excessive dynamic vary (HDR), a primary for the ladies’s sport. The manufacturing has 45 cameras in complete, together with extra tremendous slow-mo and high-frame-rate cameras than ever earlier than.
These are all indicators of progress. The fascinating quantity for me might be how the Last 4 and title sport tracks not towards 2023 however the 2022 title sport, which we will name the “PTC Period” (Prior To Caitlin). That title sport — a 64-49 South Carolina win over Bueckers and UConn — averaged 4.85 million viewers. On the time, it was the most-watched girls’s title sport since 2004, and the fourth-largest viewers to look at a girls’s championship sport since 1996. The UConn-Stanford nationwide semifinal in 2022 drew 3.23 million viewers, which was the most-watched girls’s semifinal sport within the PTC period since 2012.
These are the numbers to beat — and I feel this Last 4 and championship sport will do it comfortably.
(Picture: Alika Jenner / Getty Pictures)