Four Years of the Familiar: The Secret to Women's College Basketball's Success

A reminder of what resonates with the American public

There was a lot of reaction in the sports world to the following chart from a Wall Street Journal article titled, “NCAA Women Beat Men in Finals’ Ratings for First Time—but Got 99% Less TV Money”:

There are caveats. The women’s championship game was on a widely distributed network TV (ABC) + ESPN, whereas the men’s championship game was on an amalgam of Turner channels. I could also get into how some of the historical records set by Sunday’s South Carolina victory over Iowa aren’t entirely accurate due to the post 2020 Nielsen inclusion of Out of Home (OOH) viewing, but that’s getting too lost in the weeds. The broader story, reflected by the chart, is true: The men’s game has slowly declined in relevance over the last decade whereas the women’s game has seen a meteoric rise in the Caitlin Clark era.

But forget the men’s college game for a moment. Let’s go bigger picture. Iowa vs. South Carolina outdrew recent championships from the other major professional leagues outside of football, an unthinkable outcome a few years ago. So what happened here? Obviously it’s Clark, but it’s not just Clark. There’s something about the conditions of women’s college basketball that helped set this all into motion.

It’s common in Sports Media Land to attribute this sudden growth in NCAAW popularity to ESPN finally taking women’s basketball seriously. It’s a hard theory to push back on in media spaces, where it’s fashionable for people to broadcast slogans like “invest in women’s sports!” By arguing against “resources” having a lot to do with Clarkapalooza you, a monster, are undermining the case for pouring resources into the WNBA and other women’s leagues. And yet…hey. I just don’t believe the resources-based theory on college women’s basketball meteoric rise.

ESPN wasn’t hiding this sporting event from us. It started broadcasting the entirety of the women’s tournament back in 2003. That was over two decades ago and the broadcaster seemed pretty excited when Final Four games started reaping seven figure viewership numbers. Women’s March Madness has been a resonant TV offering for awhile now, anchored by the stars of the moment, promoted to the millions who annually enjoy it. It’s not like, prior to Clark, ESPN buried any mention of the sport or relegated it to the wee hours. What’s happened in recent years isn’t the difference between the NBA Finals being on tape delay vs. getting featured live on network television.

No, what’s happened is this, roughly: NCAAW basketball maintained a good level of popularity, though lesser than the men’s side, and truly popped once a transcendent star (Caitlin Clark) came through. Right now, we’re looking at the after effects of that transcendent star’s impact, but more credit should be given for maintaining millions of fans as a baseline during an era when other professional sports saw fall off. So how did this happen, against the trendlines?

Familiarity Wins

You know what people don’t really like about the NBA? The Player Empowerment Era. You can argue that fans are being possessive or racist or whatever else. You can assert that free agency is a sacred right. Whatever moral frame you want to put on the situation, the result ended up disillusioning committed fans and confusing casuals.

For awhile, the NBA was praised by media for having the most exciting, social-media dominant offseason. So much drama, so much tension. Look at Twitter! What star might switch teams?!

The issue with playing this out a few too many times is that a lot of stars become something less than a familiar presence. Indeed, they become men without a country. Coming to the Lakers probably raised Anthony Davis’ profile, but James Harden, Kawhi Leonard, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant aren’t widely associated with their current teams.

To the NBA Twitter addict, it’s obvious which guys play for what, but most people aren’t like that. It takes awhile for the public to become aware of who you are and the team you represent. If you change it up too often, a lot of people either lose track of you, lose interest or both. Local NBA ratings aren’t available like they once were, but a standard pattern was that drafted cores got the best viewership; Mercenary units weren’t nearly as followed. Stick around and more people will stick with you. But it takes time.

The women’s college game has time. The introduction of NIL money keeps stars in place for four years because WNBA salaries are just that comparatively meager. While the transfer portal might do to the sport what player empowerment did to the NBA, Caitlin Clark’s four years at Iowa speak to the branding power of standing pat. Stay in one place and we know where to find you; Move around and we move on.

In that vein, the men’s college game has a very basic issue that the women’s game does not: The best men’s talent immediately leaps to the lucrative NBA once discovered. The NCAAW’s comparative advantage is that once you attain superstardom in college, it can build for years and years before you exit.

This is a special distinguishing feature for the women. The four year factor not only keeps stars in place for long enough to market them, but their continued presence also means the sport is generally less chaotic and thus more understandable at a glance. Teams are built over time and go on longer tournament runs than the upstart challengers. Fans can expect to see the more famous coaches deep into the Spring, every year. Continuity connects.

America Matters

This is an unfashionable if not fraught take, and yet it’s so obviously true: All things being equal, Americans prefer to watch Americans. Again, this isn’t a moral statement. It is merely descriptive. Commissioners love to fantasize about globalizing their sports and reaping profits in emergent markets; Fans, on the other hand, just want to root for the local kid.

It is not the fault of Eastern European basketball prodigies that Americans are comparatively less invested. I don’t think this has much to do with hatred or even jingoism. There are just fewer barriers to entry for my countrymen when getting to know Caitlin Clark versus, say, Nikola Jokic. It is what it is.

There’s been such a sports business focus on international ambitions, to the detriment of valuing domestic popularity. The reigning sports league assumption was that you could be just as popular stateside and conquer China plus whatever else was out there. It turns out, there are tradeoffs. The NBA and MLB have both gone global in terms of talent, which likely extends their respective footprints outside the country. That latter part is nice, but both leagues have lost resonance at home, in what is still the world’s largest economy.

This isn’t an issue in American collegiate athletics, though. The competitors are nearly all American, with a few exceptions here or there. As the other sports get more international, this contrast becomes pronounced to the point of becoming a value proposition. Staying the same as others change can become an unexpected source of growth.

It’s ironic because the hokey Americanness of college sports might have informed the media sense that it was a declining property. Too parochial, too old timey. Five years ago, nobody would have predicted a college football boom. And yet, college football is booming, while aforementioned women’s basketball is reaching heights unimagined. For 30 years, we’ve been told that soccer, that global behemoth, is just about to conquer America. But Caitlin Clark got 18.7 million viewers on Sunday and that Liverpool vs. Manchester United match got 1.8. Go figure.

Quoting my piece on football’s expanding dominance:

My region, a region which has dominated fashionable corporate thinking over the last decade, is wholly consumed by what’s next. And it’s not just a romantic fixation. Silicon Valley is also terrified of losing out on whatever’s next, because your company might just be “disrupted” into obsolescence by this new technology. Today’s discovery can make you tomorrow’s newspapers or taxi cabs. Lose out and potentially die.

Such a focus on the future can make you forget the viability of what’s already there. So much of the answer to why women’s college basketball just had a massive moment is that it was already there, in a familiar place, with a familiar structure. Year after year the same players were returning, playing for schools you’ve already heard of, at least if you’re American. Then, suddenly, a girl from Iowa became a phenom.

The next Big Thing in sports didn’t come from China, Japan, or Brazil. It was a homegrown product, with an emphasis on “grown.” Some miracles take time, the most rewarding of which, like one’s own children, become great in the friendly confines of your backyard.