The Athletic has stay protection of Texas vs. South Carolina and UCLA vs. UConn within the 2025 Girls’s Closing 4.
Begin occasions matter in sports activities in relation to championship recreation viewership. The World Collection, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup Closing, the NCAA males’s basketball title recreation and school soccer nationwide championship recreation, simply to call a couple of mega-events, all start in a first-rate time (on the East Coast) tv window. The Tremendous Bowl airs barely earlier (roughly 6:30 p.m. ET) however concludes in the course of prime time. There’s a purpose tv programmers have traditionally carried out this, and it follows the identical adage that Willie Sutton used when somebody requested him why he robbed banks.
As a result of that’s the place the viewers are.
Previous to arriving at The Athletic, I lined girls’s school basketball for Sports activities Illustrated for greater than a decade, together with yearly the ladies’s Closing 4. The position gave me a window into the game, and I might see the potential for an financial rocket shot because the gamers bought extra expert and athletic, and packages bought deeper. The previous three years have proven every part factors arrow up:
- Within the BCC Period (Earlier than Caitlin Clark), the 2022 title recreation between South Carolina and UConn drew 4.85 million viewers and peaked at 5.91 million viewers throughout ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, essentially the most viewers in practically 20 years.
- In 2023, the championship moved from ESPN networks to ABC. The title matchup between LSU and Clark’s Iowa greater than doubled 2022, averaging 9.9 million viewers.
- Final yr, the South Carolina-Iowa title recreation drew an astonishing 18.9 million viewers on ABC and peaked at 24.1 million. It was the most-watched basketball recreation (males’s or girls’s, school or professional) since 2019.
The final two title video games tipped off at 3 p.m. ET, and there’s a sturdy argument to be made that even with their more and more enormous TV scores, all of them left much more viewers consideration on the desk by airing at 3 p.m. ET, quite than primetime, when extra folks would watch.
Throughout my years of writing about girls’s basketball, I’ve watched ESPN make a much bigger dedication to its protection, from airing extra high-profile regular-season video games in higher programming home windows to enhancing its studio protection with devoted girls’s basketball consultants. The corporate made the choice in 2021 to air all 63 NCAA Event video games nationally and positioned each semifinal video games on Huge ESPN. Now, the title recreation airs on ABC. ESPN acknowledged it had a product with rising mass attraction and acted accordingly.
The deal that ESPN signed with the NCAA final yr — an eight-year, $920 million media rights settlement that featured 40 championships bundled collectively (together with girls’s basketball) via 2032 — has contractual provisions that the title recreation will air on ABC. It is a great point.
However the time has come. Slightly than the same old 3 p.m. ET begin time — as with this Sunday’s championship recreation — the title recreation ought to air on ABC in prime time beginning subsequent yr, and ESPN executives and the NCAA ought to advocate exhausting for this.
The ABC schedule this Sunday consists of new episodes of “America’s Funniest Dwelling Movies” (7 p.m. ET), “American Idol” (8 p.m. ET) and “The $100,000 Pyramid” (10 p.m. ET, and celeb contestants embody Rob Riggle, Luenell, Fortune Feimster and Rachel Dratch). That’s not precisely NBC’s Thursday evening lineup within the Nineteen Nineties.
The Walt Disney Co. would profit much more in the long term from exposing one in every of its vital sports activities properties to a much bigger viewers as a result of girls’s basketball goes to be performed on ESPN/ABC far longer than “Idol” and “Pyramid” will run on that community. American Idol drew 4.66 million viewers final Sunday whereas Pyramid drew 2.29 million viewers. The ladies’s title recreation would obliterate this in prime time.
Everybody needs to guard their very own fiefdom at Disney, and there are respectable challenges. Idol might have constructed into its contract that it could actually’t be pre-empted. So far as non-NFL programming, Idol additionally generates greater than $100,000 for a 30-second spot, which is powerful in 2025 for a broadcast present. So that you would wish loads of executives from a number of sister companions to make this occur, however that is good long-term company enterprise for the mum or dad firm. Willow Bay, the dean of the USC Annenberg College for Communication and Journalism, and her partner Bob Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Firm, know properly the facility of girls’s sports activities. Final yr, the couple bought a controlling stake in Angel Metropolis FC of the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League. Iger could make this occur very simply if he needs it.
Final season’s nationwide championship recreation drew extra viewers for a basketball recreation than any since 2019. (Al Bello / Getty Photographs)
Little question the afternoon window has produced nice viewership for the title recreation during the last two years, and a 3 p.m. (ET) Sunday tip has advantages, given it’s an accessible time for youthful followers. (The prosecution has no objection right here, your honor.) However prime time on ABC on Sunday and even Tuesday will do higher.
ESPN didn’t make a programming govt accessible upon an inquiry on this subject, more than likely as a result of it’s attempting to be a superb company companions. However final yr once I requested this of Nick Dawson, ESPN senior vp of programming and acquisitions, he mentioned:
“The conversations have occurred with regard to the time slot of the championship recreation in addition to community concerns for the nationwide semifinals. It’s an eight-year deal, so the place we begin might not be the place we end. As of proper now, our intention is to proceed with what we did — the championship recreation on ABC in that type of late afternoon Sunday slot, which from a possible viewership perspective our analysis workforce has confirmed to us that there’s not a lot distinction when it comes to potential upside between that window and in a prime-time window.”
Although the choice must occur at ranges above her, I requested Meg Arnonwitz, an ESPN senior vp of manufacturing and the purpose individual for the ladies’s match, what she considered the thought. “What I will surely be in assist of getting conversations about how we proceed to place this sport in one of the best gentle potential for it to develop and provides it the publicity it deserves,” she mentioned. “We should always by no means shrink back from having these conversations.”
Added Rebecca Lobo, the lead analyst of the ladies’s match: “Shifting the championship recreation from ESPN to ABC in 2023 proved to be a superb resolution that took benefit of the newfound reputation of girls’s school basketball. I’m curious how scores could be impacted if the sport was moved to prime time. However I additionally belief the management at ESPN to know if and when the timing is correct for that.”
The ladies’s school recreation is in an ideal place. The Elite Eight spherical averaged 2.9 million viewers, the second most-watched Elite Eight on report and up 34 % from 2023. ESPN skilled a large windfall with the nexus of Clark and a transfer of the title recreation to ABC. A major time closing is the subsequent step. When you will have momentum, trip it.
(Prime picture: Al Bello / Getty Photographs)