No Caitlin Clark, no problem—at least over the long term. 

The NCAA women’s basketball tournament begins Wednesday with its First Four games, and while this year’s event will be hard-pressed to match the historic heights of 2024, the competition will still showcase the sport’s overall rise. 

The 2025 edition of March Madness will carry the momentum of a regular season that included ESPN’s highest average viewership since the 2008–2009 season for women’s basketball, rising 3% from 2024 and 41% from two years ago. Recent conference title games, meanwhile, fell short of last year’s audiences in several respects, but they still similarly showed growth from 2023, when Clark initially burst onto the national scene with the first of her two Naismith Player of the Year awards. 

The Big Ten tournament final in particular between UCLA and USC—the Nos. 1 and 4 teams in the country, respectively—drew the second-largest audience in that event’s history, trailing only a Clark-led Iowa triumph last year over Nebraska.  

Star Power 

Beyond the broader escalation of women’s sports, and basketball specifically, a key element of this year’s March Madness is an even larger group of top stars. While Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese dominated much of the mainstream attention of last year’s tournament, this year’s iteration will feature a deep array of top talent that includes UConn’s Paige Bueckers, USC’s JuJu Watkins, UCLA’s Lauren Betts, and Florida State’s Ta’Niya Latson, among others. 

South Carolina, last year’s champion and coached by women’s basketball icon Dawn Staley, is also back as a No. 1 seed and seeking to be the first repeat title-winner in the sport since UConn’s 2013–2016 run of four straight. The team, however, lost out on the tournament’s top overall seed to UCLA, in part reflecting the new-look nature and rising parity in the sport.

The NCAA selection committee, meanwhile, is facing some backlash for a tournament bracket that places the Watkins-led USC and Bueckers-led UConn in the same regional. Arguably the tournament’s two most notable players, as a result, are set for a matchup in the Elite Eight as opposed to later in March Madness—when even higher viewership is likely—and at least one of the two stars will not be in the Final Four. 

A prior matchup of the two stars in December drew more than 2.2 million viewers on Fox, the largest audience for women’s college basketball this season. There was “no consideration” of those factors, however, the NCAA said.

“It wasn’t about putting [teams] in the same pod. We put them in the spot they earned,” said NCAA women’s tournament chair Derita Dawkins. 

The 2025 Women’s March Madness tournament is a historic one: It’s the first under the eight-year, $920 million contract extension between ESPN and the NCAA.

The deal, which was signed in January 2024, was for 40 NCAA championships. The women’s basketball tournament was its centerpiece, valued at $65 million per year, nearly twice as much as the $34 million average payout received in its previous deal. 

The extension followed a 2023 tournament that averaged 983,000 viewers on ESPN networks, up 55% from the previous year, including a championship game between Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes and Angel Reese’s LSU Tigers that drew nearly 10 million viewers. 

While the deal was a sign of the women’s tournament growth, it still received criticism. There was a belief that women’s March Madness was still undervalued and that it should earn a separate deal from other NCAA championships, similar to the men’s. A gender equity report commissioned by the NCAA in 2021 estimated the women’s tournament could be worth $81 million to $112 million per year on its own.

That criticism only grew after the 2024 tournament, which took place just months after the media-rights extension was signed and surpassed perhaps even the most optimistic women’s basketball supporters’ expectations. 

Women’s March Madness Full Tournament Viewership Average

• 2024: 2.2 million (+121%)
• 2023: 983,000
• 2022: 634,000
• 2021: 546,000 

The 2024 women’s tournament final famously outpaced the men’s championship game, drawing 18.9 million viewers on ABC.

The men’s March Madness tournament will also have its eight-year media-rights extension with CBS and TNT kick in this year—a deal agreed upon way back in 2016—worth an average of $1.1 billion per year, nearly 17 times as much as the women’s annual deal.

However, there were a few reasons for the relatively low price of the women’s deal. When negotiations started in 2022, spending was somewhat constrained, as seen by ESPN’s decision to pass on the Big Ten. The Pac-12 overestimated its value that year and lost most of its schools.

NCAA president Charlie Baker also told Front Office Sports that it was important to leverage the women’s tournament as a way to lift the championships of other sports. “I wanted the best deal for everybody,” Baker said after the deal was announced.

But a key point in the deal was the timing of the end of it: 2032, the same year as the men’s championship. This would allow the NCAA to negotiate the deals simultaneously and potentially amend any inequities between the two tournaments.

As evidenced by the NCAA’s latest media-rights deal, women’s March Madness is slowly working to make up for inequities with the men’s tournament.

But one major difference between the two remains in the opening rounds. While the men’s tournament annually begins in Dayton for the First Four, and then at eight neutral-site arenas across the country, the women’s event takes its own approach.

For women’s March Madness, first- and second-round games are played on the campuses of the top four seeds in each quadrant of the bracket. First Four matchups are also played at the venue where the winner will ultimately end up. 

For example, UC San Diego and Southern University will compete for a No. 16 seed Wednesday at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles, where the winner will face No. 1 UCLA on Friday, and where No. 8 Richmond vs. No. 9 Georgia Tech will take place. The 1–16 and 8–9 winners will face off Sunday.

The same process will play out at the other 15 home venues of the Nos. 2, 3, and 4 seeds in each portion of the bracket.

Watch Party

While playing on campuses for the opening rounds gives the women’s tournament a much different feel than the men have at neutral sites, the results at the turnstiles have been positive in recent years.

In 2024, a record 292,456 fans attended first- and second-round games, an increase of more than 60,000 from 2023. Not surprisingly, Iowa City was the most-attended site. Sellout crowds totaled more than 28,000 fans at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, as Caitlin Clark and Iowa beat Holy Cross and West Virginia en route to a second straight Final Four appearance.