Iowa-UConn women’s Final Four game is the most-watched hoops game in ESPN history

BRISTOL, Conn. — Iowa’s 71-69 victory over UConn on the girls’s Closing 4 on Friday evening averaged 14.2 million viewers on ESPN, making it the most-viewed girls’s basketball sport on report and the most important viewers for an ESPN basketball broadcast.

The earlier girls’s hoops mark was 12.3 million for final Monday’s Iowa-LSU sport within the Elite Eight. Recreation 7 of the 2018 Jap Convention finals between Cleveland and Boston was ESPN’s most-watched basketball sport at 13.51 million.

That additionally makes it one of many most-viewed video games in any sport aside from school soccer and the NFL over the previous couple years. Final yr’s NCAA males’s title sport between San Diego State and UConn averaged 14.79 million.

The Hawkeyes sport, which noticed the viewers peak at 17 million, will doubtless go down as one of many prime 50 primetime telecasts of 2024. It will have completed thirty second on final yr’s record.

Additionally it is ESPN’s second-highest viewers for a non-football broadcast. The USA-Portugal match throughout group play within the 2014 males’s World Cup averaged 18.22 million.

The final NBA sport to attract at the least 14 million was Golden State’s title-clinching victory over Boston in Recreation 6 of the 2022 NBA Finals (14.22 million).

Iowa guard Caitlin Clark’s 5 March Insanity video games on ESPN and ABC have averaged 8.3 million. Iowa will face South Carolina for the nationwide championship Sunday afternoon on ABC.

South Carolina’s 78-59 victory over North Carolina State averaged 7.1 million viewers, making it the third most-watched girls’s nationwide semifinal since data began being stored in 1992.

The earlier report for the most-viewed semifinal was Stanford vs. Virginia on CBS in 1992 (8.1 million).

Friday’s two video games averaged 10.8 million viewers, a 138% improve over final yr.