BRISTOL, Conn. — Iowa’s 71-69 victory over UConn on the girls’s Ultimate 4 on Friday evening averaged 14.2 million viewers on ESPN, making it the most-viewed girls’s basketball sport on report and the biggest 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 NBA Jap Convention finals between Cleveland and Boston was ESPN’s most-watched basketball sport at 13.51 million.
The Iowa-UConn matchup can be one of many most-viewed video games in any sport apart from faculty soccer and the NFL over the previous couple years. Final 12 months’s NCAA males’s basketball title sport between San Diego State and UConn averaged 14.79 million.
The Hawkeyes sport, which noticed the viewers peak at 17 million, will probably go down as one of many prime 50 primetime telecasts of 2024. It will have completed thirty second on final 12 months’s checklist.
Additionally it is ESPN’s second-highest viewers for a non-football broadcast. The US-Portugal match throughout group play within the 2014 males’s soccer World Cup averaged 18.22 million.
The final NBA sport to attract a minimum of 14 million viewers was Golden State’s title-clinching victory over Boston in Recreation 6 of the 2022 NBA Finals (14.22 million).
Clark’s 5 March Insanity video games on ESPN and ABC have averaged 8.3 million viewers. Iowa will face South Carolina for the nationwide championship Sunday afternoon on ABC.
South Carolina’s 78-59 victory over NC State averaged 7.1 million viewers, making it the third-most-watched girls’s nationwide semifinal since data began being saved 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 12 months.