Why March Madness belongs to the women: Star players and high ratings make it a tournament to watch

There is always a sign.

I first noticed something special happening last spring when I couldn’t walk half a block in Dallas without encountering large groups of fans from Iowa or South Carolina. There were also my friends back home who, for the first time, planned their weekend around the women’s NCAA Tournament games instead of the men’s games. And all the sports talk radio channels were discussing Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My senses tingled.

I felt it in my bones that the sport was ready for a breakthrough, even though I couldn’t have imagined that nearly 10 million people would tune in to watch the Iowa-LSU national title game, breaking the previous record for viewership of a women’s game . basketball game. But I could see that the barrier of apathy had been broken; these women, that spotted at the end of the match, the sport itself – it would be talked about for days, weeks and months to come.

I have the same feeling right now.

There is another big step forward for a sport that should get used to these advances. As we head into March Madness, the women’s side of the tournament takes center stage. It’s the women’s stars that shine the brightest. It’s the women’s game with the most intriguing storylines.

And… there’s no arguing about that!

“We’re on a steady slope,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said on my SiriusXM show Sunday night. “You combine the star power in our game, the fact that you have some of these established stars that fans have really built a relationship with, like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink – and then you add this incredibly dynamic freshman class.

“What we’re seeing is that women’s basketball is a really marketable entity. People love it. We’re in a space with an incredible amount of excitement around it. … It’s something that’s actually a movement.”

We’ve seen those insanely long lines of fans waiting to get into the arena – any arena – to see Clark play. More than 3 million people watched Clark’s Hawkeyes beat Nebraska in overtime in the Big Ten championship game on CBS, peaking at 4.45 million (!) in overtime. Clark is so ubiquitous that she was discussed several times during this year’s NBA All-Star Weekend broadcast…while her State Farm commercials aired during the breaks.

ESPN recently announced that this was the most-watched regular season for women’s basketball in more than fifteen years, with viewership on ESPN platforms increasing 37 percent from last season. Last Sunday’s SEC championship between LSU and South Carolina drew nearly 2 million viewers, and the Pac-12 title game on the same day between USC and Stanford — the Trojans a No. 1 seed and the Cardinal a No. 2 seed in the upcoming tournament — drew 1.4 million viewers, a 461 percent increase from last season’s championship. Those three title games topped the three NBA weekend games.

With more eyeballs comes more exposure for fans, both new and old. Now they only know the stars by first name. Caitlin. Angel. Paige. JuJu. Comb. Hannah.

Fast! Walk into your neighborhood sports bar and ask someone to name the five men’s basketball players playing this week. Can they do it? I’m not sure I’d bet a beer on that.

Recently, Kevin Garnett on his podcast, KG Certified, made the same point. “This is my first time watching college basketball where I know more girls than boys,” he said. “This is the first time we’ve had women’s basketball over men’s basketball. Women’s college basketball is…electric. It blows the man’s game out of the water.

Of course, that doesn’t matter much if we sit on our couches or bar stools for 14 hours straight on Thursday and 14 hours straight on Friday. We’ll still watch the men’s games and fall in love with Cinderellas, even if they break our braces. We’ll be concerned about a coach’s terrible late-game clock management. And we’ll continue to keep an eye on the men, because theirs has been the best postseason in sports for a long time.

But parity on the women’s side has changed the calculus somewhat. That includes the transient nature of men’s college basketball; one-and-dones combined with the transfer portal have made it harder than ever for players to become national names in the sport. And so many of the biggest men’s stars – the Hall of Fame coaches – have retired and left the sport without any weight.

And that has opened a door for the women’s game. This is the sport with players who stay for three or four years and grow before our eyes. This is the sport where Hall of Fame coaches continue to lead the way — many even recognizing it by their first names: Dawn, Geno, Tara, Kim — even as equality increases and college athletics evolve under their feet.

So this week I’m particularly interested in Clark’s final tournament run and whether she can lead the Hawkeyes to another Final Four. I want to see JuJu Watkins, the freshman phenom who revitalized USC’s women’s program, on the big stage for the first time. I want to pretend that in my daily life I have half the energy that Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo has on defense in just one game. I’ll be waiting with pins and needles to see if South Carolina can complete a perfect season after coming up just short a year ago.

There will undoubtedly be the usual Neanderthals, men who still try to claim that “no one” watches women’s basketball, despite all the evidence to the contrary. These opinions are now shouted down by the fathers who bond with their daughters by taking them to games and the mothers of little boys who wear Clark jerseys and don’t think there is anything strange about idolizing a female athlete. These guys can cling to their silly old-fashioned punchlines that don’t make any sense anymore, while we watch rapturous basketball and join this rocket ship as it takes off.

“Last year it was eye-opening and we fed off that momentum, and it never stopped,” Notre Dame coach Niele Ivey told me on Sunday. “Great teams, great players – the women’s game is just hot.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletics; Photos by Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Hannah Hidalgo: Eakin Howard / Adam Bettcher / Icon Sportswire, Joseph Weiser / Icon Sportswire)