Attend, or even just watch, a women’s sports game these days and you’ll see the phrase splashed across the front of fans’ black T-shirts: “Everyone watches women’s sports.”
At last year’s N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament, that idea seemed truer than ever. For the first time since the inception of the N.C.A.A. women’s championship in 1982, the women’s final drew more viewers than the men’s — 18.9 million compared with 14.8.
For the women, it was a dramatic jump from the year before, when the final drew almost 10 million viewers. For the men, it continued a downward trend: Viewership was roughly half what it was in 2015, according to Nielsen.
The 2023 and 2024 finals featured Caitlin Clark, whose four years with the Iowa Hawkeyes helped push the sport to new highs. But Clark did not do it alone: Women’s basketball had been growing before her arrival.
A parade of superstars
Men’s basketball had a head start.
The N.C.A.A. was created in 1906, but it did not have leagues for all women’s sports until after the 1972 passage of Title IX, a law that requires equal treatment for all students in school sports. Over those first seven decades, the men received more investment and also more airtime, which gave them greater visibility.
Over the last 30 years, though, women have narrowed the attention gap, with help from a cadre of superstars who paved the way for Clark.
Rebecca Lobo led the University of Connecticut to its first national championship in 1995; now the Huskies have a record 11 titles. Tennessee’s Candace Parker in 2006 became the first woman to dunk during the N.C.A.A. tournament. And Sabrina Ionescu finished her career at Oregon in 2020 with more than 2,000 career points, 1,000 rebounds and 1,000 assists — the first men’s or women’s collegiate player to do so.
A new era
More recently, the rivalry between Clark of Iowa and Angel Reese of Louisiana State pushed the sport forward once again. Their games attracted sellout crowds, even on the road, and broke TV viewership records.
At the same time, the popularity of the W.N.B.A., women’s soccer, and even of sports like women’s rugby exploded. Women’s sports bars began opening across the country. Ad dollars rose sharply. And the introduction of name, image and likeness programs made it so that college athletes could cash in on their celebrity.
With Clark and Reese now graduated to the W.N.B.A, women’s college basketball seems to be holding its own.
On ESPN, viewership is up 3 percent from last season, according to The Sports Business Journal. More than a million people tuned in to see U.C.L.A. defeat U.S.C. in the Big 10 Conference championship last Sunday — an impressive number, though it’s two million fewer viewers than those who tuned in to the same game last year, when Clark played.
Tonight, the N.C.A.A. will announce which teams are in the women’s and men’s tournaments. The women’s field has big stars — including Paige Bueckers of UConn and JuJu Watkins of U.S.C. — and talented teams like Texas, Notre Dame and U.C.L.A. that will try to stop South Carolina from winning its second straight title.
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THE SUNDAY DEBATE
Was Senator Chuck Schumer right to support Republicans’ spending bill in order to avoid a government shutdown?
Yes. Voters want change, not a dysfunctional government. “Our country has to be about more than one side gaining the advantage over the other,” NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo says.
No. The spending bill gives Trump power to fire more federal workers. “Oligarch Elon Musk and his acolyte Donald Trump are already shutting down the government, illegally, unconstitutionally, in pieces,” Joan Walsh writes for The Nation.
FROM OPINION
Defending controversial opinions in academia protects higher education from censorship, the Editorial Board writes.
Dani Shapiro always thought of her diaries as garbage. But after a cancer diagnosis, they became the only unedited record of her life, she writes.
Here’s a column by David French on Mahmoud Khalil.
No slowing down: At 95, Iichi Marumo is the world’s oldest speedskater. He’s gunning for 100.
Ask the Therapist: “‘Gentle parenting’ is spoiling my granddaughter. What should I do?”
Most clicked yesterday: A draft list for the Trump administration’s planned travel ban includes 43 countries. See the list.
Vows: Learning a shared love language that includes signing.
Lives Lived: Roy Prosterman was a lawyer who left a lucrative corporate law practice to champion land reform in the underdeveloped world. He died at 89.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
“Careless People,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams: When Wynn-Williams was 13, she was attacked by a shark while vacationing in a remote part of New Zealand. The pain — it felt “like being hit by a knife attached to a freight train,” she writes in her memoir — turned out to be an apt metaphor for her career at Facebook, where she worked for seven years starting in 2011. In “Careless People,” Wynn-Williams recalls her time there, first as manager of global public policy and eventually as director. This is an insider’s account — she flew on private planes with Mark Zuckerberg and navigated Davos alongside Sheryl Sandberg, then chief executive officer — and she has stories. Some are choice tidbits (Sandberg’s $13,000 lingerie bill); others are classic corporate drama (should Zuckerberg follow Big Bird in a lineup of speakers at the Global Citizen Festival?). But the real takeaway from this frank, occasionally funny book is Wynn-Williams’s disillusionment. She signed on with dreams of global connection and left convinced that, as she puts it, “Facebook is an autocracy of one.”
This week’s subject for The Interview is Schumer, the Senate minority leader. We spoke before and after his controversial vote for the Republican spending bill, which averted a government shutdown.
Can I just ask you about the tactic here? Because the choice that you made to vote with the Republicans, isn’t that an argument to get rid of the filibuster? You wanted to keep it when you were in the majority, but if you’re not going to use it in the minority, then what’s the point of it?
The point here, again, I’ll repeat what I said, would be how devastating a shutdown would be.
But I’m asking about the use of the filibuster.
The bottom line is if the filibuster would have been used and the government shut down, the devastation would be terrible. You see, we’ve had government shutdowns before, but never against such nihilists, such anti-government fanatics as Trump, DOGE, Musk. They’ve given us a playbook, by the way. [Russell] Vought has already has written what he wants to shut down if he got a shutdown. Trump wanted a shutdown. Musk wanted a shutdown. Ask yourself why.
In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Margaux Laskey recommends five highly rated, easy recipes that pack a protein punch, including honey-habanero pork chops, coconut-caramel braised tofu and shrimp and asparagus stir-fry.
NOW TIME TO PLAY
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was violator.
Can you put eight historical events — including the development of Champagne, the writing of “The Great Gatsby” and the creation of the “I Heart NY” logo — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.
