Two weeks ago, a whopping 18.7 million viewers watched the NCAA women’s basketball championship between Iowa and South Carolina across ABC and the “Bird and Taurasi Show” on ESPN – not only the most watched basketball game, men’s or women’s, college or pro, since the 2019 men’s national championship (and topping every NBA game since the 2017 Finals), but the most watched sporting event at all, outside football and the Olympics, since the 2019 World Series.
Needless to say, it was the most-watched game in women’s college basketball history, breaking the record set by… the national semifinal between Iowa and UConn two days earlier, which drew 14.2 million viewers across ESPN and ESPN2. That, in turn, broke the mark set by… the regional final the previous Monday between Iowa and LSU, which drew 12.3 million viewers to ESPN alone. An Elite Eight game on cable alone drew a larger audience than last year’s national championship between the same two teams on broadcast, which fell short of ten million, and indeed any previous women’s college basketball game, including when the women’s Final Four regularly aired on CBS in the 80s and 90s.
Obviously a lot of this has to do with the singular, and likely inimitable, phenomenon that is Iowa star Caitlin Clark, but it’s not just her; the most-watched game of the women’s tournament not involving Iowa or having Iowa as a lead-in or lead-out was undefeated South Carolina’s Elite Eight game, which still set the record for the most-watched Elite Eight game ever before Clark and Iowa blew it out of the water the following night. That game aired on ABC, which has only recently started airing women’s tournament games at all (let alone the national championship, which only started last year), but ESPN has aired three national championship games that failed to reach the 3.07 million viewers South Carolina’s win over Oregon State did, and of the 26 national championships that aired on cable alone from 1996 to 2022, only eight drew more than a million more viewers than South Carolina-Oregon State, two of them in the last two years before the title game moved to ABC.
So there’s reason to think that women’s college basketball can maintain some of its momentum and establish a new baseline for popularity. But it’ll have to do it without the forces that brought it to these heights this year. It’s not just that Clark has now left for the WNBA, drafted by the Indiana Fever; so has LSU’s Angel Reese, her nemesis in last year’s national championship game. So has the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso, both selected by the Chicago Sky to set up what could be a juicy Midwestern rivalry for years to come. UConn’s Paige Bueckers elected to return to college for another year, and even once she leaves the college game will be fine with the emergence of new stars such as USC’s freshman phenom Juju Watkins, not to mention all the young girls inspired by Clark and her cohorts that will come along over the next decade or two, but for now, all the biggest stars of this year’s tournament will now be the territory of the WNBA for the foreseeable future.
And therein lies an enormous opportunity… if the WNBA can put itself in position to take advantage of it.
The WNBA has long trailed its college counterpart in popularity; only one WNBA finals has ever drawn more average viewers than the least-watched national championship game of the ESPN era, and that was a) the first Finals ever b) played as a single game c) on NBC. No WNBA Finals have drawn more than a million viewers on average since 2000, and since NBC stopped airing the league, only one Finals has outdrawn any of the ones NBC aired. Last year’s Finals were the most-watched in 20 years with a mere 728,000 average viewers. Meanwhile, this year’s WNBA draft drew 2.45 million viewers, the league’s biggest audience in any capacity since 2000, and more than any WNBA Finals other than the aforementioned first one – raising the prospect that as Clark enters, she is quite literally bigger than the league, by a wide margin. In the larger sports landscape, while I’m skeptical of MLS’ claims to be the fifth major sport, in part because before the Apple TV deal, it only barely drew a larger audience to MLS cup than the WNBA Finals at best (the 2022 Cup drew over two million viewers – still lower than a weak Stanley Cup Final – but last year’s drew less than 900,000, at least on linear), it still manages to draw around two billion dollars in revenue. Not only is the WNBA’s revenue a tiny fraction of that, it’s barely half that of the relatively new NWSL, which outdrew the WNBA Finals for last year’s championship game that was down from the year before.
To be sure, the Women’s World Cup is a bigger deal than women’s college basketball and arguably bigger than the Olympic women’s basketball tournament (which gets lost in the shuffle of everything else happening at the Olympics, especially since it’s effectively a formality until the US wins the gold), and both MLS and the NWSL are propped up by the interest in soccer abroad, but it should be an occasion for sober reflection that the WNBA has fallen behind what’s at least the third attempt at a women’s professional soccer league that’s appeared since it launched, has failed to shake its status as the low-hanging butt of jokes for stand-up comedians and sexist sports commentators, and arguably isn’t even making money commensurate with the popularity it does have. It’s hard to shake the notion that without its relationship with the NBA, the WNBA would have folded long ago, following the fate of its predecessor in the ABL, and women’s professional basketball would have gone through the same rounds of instability as women’s professional soccer has.
The lack of revenue has serious consequences: Brittney Griner spent a year in a Russian prison, used as a bargaining chip in international politics, because of the need to play in overseas leagues to supplement the meager income she earns in the WNBA. With the advent of NIL, some people wondered if Clark could actually make more money staying in college another year than turning pro (under a rookie deal, she’ll be making under a hundred grand a year from the Fever), and while she can retain those deals on top of her WNBA salary, they’d be worth substantially less in the seeming relative anonymity of the WNBA (though Clark did manage to score a multi-million dollar deal with Nike) – not to mention that the vast majority of players don’t get to benefit from those sponsorship deals (even A’ja Wilson, arguably the biggest non-Clark star in the league, is probably undervalued by sponsors). On the side of the league itself, the Houston Comets, the Chicago Bulls of the league’s early years that won the first four WNBA championships, have been dead for over 15 years; only three franchises of the eight that competed in the league’s inaugural season are still playing in the same markets today, and the league has stood somewhat unsteadily with the same twelve teams, two of which have relocated at least once, since 2009, though an expansion franchise is expected to begin play in the Bay Area in 2025, and WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has stated that her goal is to eventually expand to 16 teams, an increase of a third from the current total. The talent is certainly there for an expansion – this year’s WNBA draft went three rounds, one more than the men’s NBA draft – but it only underscores the need to drastically increase revenue to avoid diluting the pie too much.
The popularity of women’s sports has been booming of late, as shown by the ratings for the women’s NCAA tournament, the NWSL, and more, but the WNBA has only marginally benefitted if at all. Even after ESPN dramatically reduced the amount of regular-season baseball it airs in the new contract, the WNBA is easily forgettable spackle on its schedule, at least outside of “event” games such as Griner’s return and Clark’s upcoming debut. Yet ESPN is the exclusive home of the WNBA playoffs; the league’s deal with CBS clearly seems to be to provide content for CBS Sports Network with broadcast-network games an extra bonus, and its other national television outlets are NBATV and the Ion network, plus Prime Video. Those playoff games are arguably treated worse than the regular season, with games on broadcast going up against the NFL and games on cable scheduled around that and college football. By contrast, when NBC had rights to the league the Finals typically wrapped up by Labor Day, which probably has something to do with the league’s inability to reach the heights of its early years in terms of ratings.
The NBA and WNBA’s television deals currently run through their respective 2025 seasons, meaning negotiations for new deals will be starting soon if not already underway; the NBA’s exclusive negotiation window with ESPN and WBD recently expired, allowing the leagues to formally begin negotiating with other parties. It is imperative that the league reach a set of deals that set up this new generation of talent to maintain and enhance their stardom in the WNBA and ensure the league’s place as the premier women’s basketball league in the world. As Engelbert told CNBC shortly after the national championship, “we’re setting up this league not just for the next three to five years with this next media rights deal, but for the next 30.” At minimum, that means a substantial increase in revenue (Engelbert’s stated desire to double the league’s media revenue may well not be enough), but it also means greatly improving the league’s exposure to justify that revenue. That likely means finding new media partners that will give the league more attention than ESPN has been willing to spare recently, potentially ones that would allow the league to return to an early September finish that largely if not entirely avoids the NFL. (Potential competition with the US Open tennis tournament, when tennis probably remains the biggest professional women’s sport in the world and in the United States by a decent margin, could be a concern in that time frame, admittedly.) Even if the WNBA can’t get an earlier finish, moving the Finals to a partner that’s willing and able to put weekend games on Saturdays, against the lesser competition of college football and/or with college football as a lead-in, should allow for larger Finals audiences and better exposure (as the soccer leagues can attest).
Currently, the league’s deal with ESPN is a joint deal with the NBA, which may help to explain why ESPN seems so disinterested in the league, yet it provides most of its TV revenue. Front Office Sports reported last month that the league believes the ESPN deal undervalues its rights and that the league could get more money by going it alone. The fate of the NCAA women’s tournament may cast doubt on that; after much speculation that the NCAA would separate it from its other championships, in the end the NCAA reached a new comprehensive deal with ESPN that included the women’s basketball tournament and valued it at a level that, while a substantial increase over what it was valued as before, was substantially less than what it was thought it could have fetched on its own. But that was out of concern that the NCAA’s other championships might not be able to attract much interest without the women’s tournament as a lynchpin for the deal; the WNBA has heretofore been, on paper, the beneficiary of being lumped in with the NBA, and both leagues should be fine if the WNBA strikes out on its own, with neither being asked to also subsidize any other competition (well, unless the G League gets involved). Still, at the moment, both NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and ESPN head Jimmy Pitaro are working under the assumption that the rights will be bundled, and most other experts seem to think bundling the leagues together is a net benefit to the WNBA.
The good news is that, with the NBA representing the last major sports rights package on the market for the foreseeable future, there’s considerable interest in the men’s league that could well carry over to the women. TNT has been a stalwart broadcaster of the NBA since the network launched, but has never aired WNBA games. That may soon change; it added Candace Parker as an analyst for its NBA coverage a few years back, and Warner Bros. Discovery recently picked up rights to show WNBA games on its TNT Sports networks in the UK and Ireland. The Athletic reported last week that WBD does, in fact, have an interest in picking up WNBA games in the United States as well. (Along with ESPN, TNT has matching rights to any deal offered to another party, so if the NBA offers a deal to another outlet for some of TNT’s games that also includes WNBA games, that could be one way for TNT to get its foot in the door.) TNT’s coverage of sports is typically praised regardless of what they cover, and the fact they don’t have a full-time sports network (despite truTV making feints in that direction) and have a relatively light set of rights means everything they do cover is an event. (Keep an eye on whether MotoGP gets substantially higher ratings on the WBD networks than they have been as schedule spackle on all-sports networks.) Having TNT in the fold would go a long way to giving the WNBA an air of legitimacy and a big-event feel, not to mention being relatively wide open to scheduling games any way the parties want – though if Finals games were to air on TNT, they’d be incentivized to push them into late September to close the gap until the start of the NHL and NBA seasons.
But David Zaslav has off-and-on indicated that WBD may well be willing to go without the NBA, and even if they did re-up, the NBA has shown interest in finding new partners. Comcast, in particular, has been heavily speculated to be in the running to bring the triumphant return of the NBA to NBC, the period those old enough to remember it are still most nostalgic for, or at least NBC’s theme music. It’s not clear what a new era of NBA games on NBC would entail, or whether any games outside the broadcast network would air on USA or only on Peacock, so it’s possible an NBC deal might not be much of a boon to the WNBA, but it still brings at least the potential of quality, well-promoted coverage. Fox doesn’t seem to have much interest in NBA rights, so they might be a longshot to make much of a splash with the WNBA, but they have benefitted from Clark’s presence in the Big Ten to the point of reportedly offering to cut an NIL deal for her to remain in college one more year and have professed their commitment to women’s basketball (their failure to send any reporters to the women’s Final Four other than right-wing provocateurs from the affiliated Outkick site might have more to do with the lightness of their sports journalism operation and website more generally), so a WNBA deal might be a way to prove their bona fides.
The most intriguing approach, however, may be staking out territory on a streaming service. Streaming services mostly have smaller audiences than linear television, but Amazon’s track record with Thursday Night Football shows the gap may not be as large as you might think, not to mention their ability to deliver games to that many people, and there’s a widespread perception that streaming services are a necessity to reach younger audiences that have largely left linear television behind. It’s widely expected that the NBA will award a package of games to a streaming service that may include playoff games, and the WNBA’s existing relationship with Amazon may prove to be the foot in the door that greases the path for Amazon to pick up games from the men’s league. Expanding that relationship could prove to be just what the doctor ordered to reach the audiences attracted to the league by the stardom of Caitlin Clark and other young phenoms, and coupled with their new deal with the NWSL, would establish Amazon’s place as the streaming home of women’s sports.
Streaming may also play a key role in the distribution of local games; about half the WNBA’s teams have TV deals with broadcast stations, and Spectrum SportsNet in Los Angeles is the only non-Bally Sports RSN with exclusive rights to a WNBA team, putting the league in a similar place to MLS prior to the Apple TV deal. If Bally Sports survives its ongoing bankruptcy drama (which is not a sure thing at the moment), it’ll be because Amazon took a stake in Diamond Sports Group and became the streaming home of its networks. Though it’s a long shot, and might scare off most potential linear partners, the opportunity exists for the WNBA to go down the path blazed by MLS by reaching a comprehensive deal to air all their games on a streaming service, if they want to and the NBA lets them. Notably, the Athletic reported recently that the NBA wants to work with a streaming service to offer local NBA games directly to consumers on a non-exclusive basis, on top of current distribution via RSNs,
The incentive structure of streaming services could provide the biggest reason for the WNBA to remain chained at the hip with the NBA, as well as for continuing to stretch its playoffs into late September. “I think as you look at streamers who have a subscription model, the WNBA gives the NBA longer programming across the year,” Engelbert said before the WNBA draft. “I think Adam uses the quote of 320 [days]… I actually think it’s more days. And there’s no other set of two sports leagues that can offer that live programming and sports to a streamer like that. I would say probably in that case we need the NBA because we have a smaller footprint with only 40 games, and it’s nice to go to market together.” Being able to provide continuous basketball content year-round could be a mighty compelling argument to bring to a streaming service that needs to compel customers to remain subscribed continuously instead of dipping out during the offseason of their preferred sport.
The WNBA’s stock has never been higher, which makes this potentially the ideal time to go to market with its television rights and establish a presence that will set the league up for decades to come. Will this be the moment that the WNBA takes a great leap forward to more firmly establish its place in the American sporting landscape, or will it go down as a monstrously missed opportunity?