UConn vs. Purdue national championship averages 14.8 million viewers
Monday night, UConn completed a journey college basketball hasn’t seen since 2007. The Huskies repeated as national champions, becoming the first team since the Billy Donovan-led Florida teams to do so.
The 75-60 victory over Purdue – which aired across TBS, TNT and truTV – came in front of an average of 14.8 million viewers, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s a slight increase from last year’s title game between UConn and San Diego State on CBS, which averaged 14.7 million viewers as the Huskies brought home their first title since 2014.
It capped a huge weekend of college basketball, with the women’s NCAA Tournament setting multiple records. That culminated with Sunday’s national championship game between Iowa and South Carolina, which became the most-watched sporting event outside of football or the Olympics with 18.7 million viewers tuning to ABC for the afternoon showdown.
That means, for the first time in history, the women’s championship outdrew the men’s.
A look at men’s, women’s tourney viewership trends
Both title games have been heading in different directions, too. In 2019, the mens’ national championship averaged 19.6 million viewers, according to data from Sports Media Watch, while the women’s title game averaged 3.7 million. Since then, the men’s title game saw three years of decline from 2021-23 before this year’s slight increase. At the same time, the women’s tournament – fueled, in part, by the draw of Caitlin Clark at Iowa – put together back-to-back record years and moved to ABC from ESPN.
The women’s tournament had a strong showing this year with three consecutive viewership records during the Elite Eight, Final Four and national championship. All told, ESPN announced a 90% year-over-year increase in audience.
While the men’s tournament viewership was lower than the women’s, it was still a strong month for CBS Sports and TNT Sports. The first three days of March Madness set a viewership record, and the Sweet Sixteen also saw an uptick as the race to the Final Four continued.
The weekend in Phoenix started with a bang. UConn’s victory over Alabama was the biggest game of the night, averaging 14.18 million viewers, according to Sports Media Watch. That followed a Purdue vs. NC State matchup that averaged 11.45 million. Both games resulted in a slight uptick in viewership, with a 4% increase.
UConn dominated men’s tournament en route to repeat
UConn certainly didn’t leave any room for doubt as it rolled through the NCAA Tournament to repeat. The Huskies had a point differential of +140 through its six games, topping the 1995-96 Kentucky team for the most in history.
Perhaps even more impressive, UConn beat Purdue by 15 points despite 37 points from Boilermakers star big man Zach Edey. The Huskies instead chose to put pressure on the perimeter and take away the three-point shot, and they succeeded. Purdue shot just seven threes despite entering the game as the second-most efficient three-point shooting team in the country.
As for where his team’s two-year journey ranks among those other programs to go back-to-back, Dan Hurley didn’t sound ready to put UConn’s 2023 and 2024 victories on top. That said, he noted the difference between those past repeat champions.
“I think it’s up there in terms of the greatest two-year runs that a program maybe has ever had just because – I can’t say anything about Duke because I’m going to piss my brother off. But I guess I can say stuff about Florida. But I love Billy Donovan. So I’m in a bad spot,” Hurley said with a chuckle.
“I just think it’s the best two-year run I think in a very, very long time just because of everything we lost from last year’s team. To lose that much and, again, to do what we did again, it’s got to be as impressive a two-year run as a program’s had since prior to whoever did it before Duke. To me it is more impressive than what Florida and Duke did because they brought back their entire teams. We lost some major players.”