It’s been a bit of a trend lately that the NCAA Women’s College Basketball tournament has come to a more satisfying ending than the Men’s March Madness extravaganza.
It was just a short five years ago when Arike Ogunbowale led the Notre Dame Fighting Irish to their first women’s title since 2001, with back-to-back buzzer beaters in the Final Four, the first one to knock off the blueblood University of Connecticut Huskies before cashing in to topple the Mississippi State Bulldogs to cut down the nets.
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Since that incredible run from Ogunbowale, we saw Head Coach Kim Mulkey lead her Baylor Bears to a thrilling one-point victory over the reigning champion Notre Dame Fighting Irish in 2019. After a one-year furlough due to the COVID-19 pandemic, NCAA Women’s Basketball came roaring back with another thriller in the final when Haley Jones led the Stanford Cardinals to a wire-to-wire victory over the Arizona Wildcats.
In 2022, Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks dominated their way throughout the regular season and the tournament, establishing themselves as that season’s team of destiny.
They would go on to cruise to a title with a 15-point drubbing of UConn. Even with a relatively anticlimactic championship, it was great TV watching Staley’s squad raise the trophy that they clearly earned throughout the entire year.
- Games: Eight Sweet 16 and four Elite Eight
- Attendance Record: 82,275 fans
- Location: American Airlines Center, Dallas, Texas.
This past bracket, though, established household names of some of the biggest stars in women’s college basketball, with plenty of notable and marketable moments that will be ingrained in the minds of fans for decades on end. Paige Bueckers, Hailey Van Lith, Caitlin Clark, and Angel Reese not only crafted memories on the court, but provided plenty of entertainment with their confidence, swagger, and rivalries.
That all came to a head when Kim Mulkey’s LSU Tigers clashed against Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes in the title fight.
While the Tigers were able to keep Clark and Iowa at arm’s length throughout the entirety of the battle, Clark’s ability to catch fire at any time — more so than she already did with a record-breaking threes hit in the final — kept viewers at the edge of their seats.
The hype around this game and its stars brought in record viewership for the title game with 9.9 million recorded viewers, more than the 2021 NBA Finals and other massive sporting events.
Final Stats | ||
|---|---|---|
| LSU Tigers | Iowa Hawkeyes | |
 | vs |  |
| 38/70 | Field Goals | 28/56 |
| 11/17 – 64.7 | 3 Pointers | 14/30 – 46.7 |
| 15/21 – 71.4 | Free Throws | 15/20 – 75.0 |
| 37 | Total Rebounds | 26 |
| 14 | Offensive Rebounds | 7 |
As the game is becoming more marketed and stars continue to arise, it wouldn’t be surprising to see this upward swing continue for women’s basketball.
National Champions – yeah, those National Champions pic.twitter.com/VsICeRrX6v
— LSU Women's Basketball (@LSUwbkb) April 2, 2023
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| Title: The NCAA Women’s Final set record-breaking viewership
| Author: Andy Quach
| Date: Apr 7, 2023
