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A lot of people watched Sunday night’s women’s basketball championship game between Iowa and LSU. Per Nielsen fast-nationals, roughly 9.9 million people watched the game, obliterating previous records for the title game.
How many people are 9.9 million? Well,
For some CFB perspective on 9.9 million viewers for the women's championship game.
That's more than last season's:
-- Sugar, Orange and Cotton Bowls
-- Big 12, Pac-12 and ACC title games
-- Notre Dame-USC
-- LSU-Alabama
-- Ohio St-Penn St
-- Bama-Texas A&M primetime on CBS— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel)
Apr 3, 2023
It wasn’t just the championship game. The South Carolina-Iowa game in the Final Four drew 5.5 million people, which would be considered a great audience for a typical Big Noon Saturday college football broadcast.
You might not watch a lot of women’s college basketball. That’s fine! But this isn’t 1996 anymore, and anybody who tries to get on the internet and stubbornly insists that nobody watches or cares about women’s basketball isn’t just a dullard and a troll…but they are indisputably wrong.
People care. We saw it with the ticket prices for the championship, in the ratings for the tournament, in the merch that got sold, and in the proliferation of media outlets and bloggers and fans who are talking about it.
And that’s why it’s time to treat women’s college basketball differently. This isn’t a charity. It’s a sport.
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