Women's college basketball viewership is exploding. ESPN's coverage just posted its historic regular season numbers, fueled by record-breaking games and rising stars.

The 2025/26 regular season is the most-watched on the network in the last 17 years. This season averaged 333,000 viewers across 89 games, marking a 19% increase over the already record-setting previous season.

The network family, which includes ESPN, along with ABC, ESPN2, and ESPNU, also recorded its most-consumed women's college basketball season ever. Around 3.6 billion minutes were watched on the network, which is more than half of the total game minutes.

This increment in viewership has translated into several other historical milestones. The network aired 29 of the top 30 most-watched games on cable and broadcast six of the ten most-watched women's college basketball games of the regular season.

A record 20 games surpassed the 500,000-viewer mark, breaking the previous single-season record of 15, which was set just last year.

The largest audience of the season so far came on Valentine's Day. The LSU Tigers took on the South Carolina Gamecocks in an ABC primetime matchup that averaged 1.7 million views, peaking at 2.2 million.

In second place was the Gamecocks again, hosting Tennessee, which crossed 1.5 million views. Meanwhile, the matchup between Texas and Oklahoma averaged 1.1 million viewers.

The top 3 viewership games of the season have all been broadcast on ABC.

Milestone Ratings Confirm the Rapid Rise of Women's College Basketball

The rise of women's college basketball has been very evident since the Caitlin Clark era at Iowa, and has shown no signs of slowing down, even after her departure three years later.

This is further confirmed by Nielsen's recent partnership with "BigData+Panel" measurements. It revealed that while sports ratings in general have gone up, the college basketball scene has shown an extraordinary bump exceeding the usual 5-10% increment.

“In women’s basketball, there are some brands that drive it, but there are stars that really drive it,” ESPN Senior Director/Programming and Acquisitions Dan Margulis told Sports Business Journal.

“Just figuring out how that’s going to line up this year because there are some stars that people know about, but there are some stars that people don’t know as much about that they sure will because we get that influx of viewership on the tournament. I’m curious to see who’s going to resonate.” He added.

This increased visibility and broader mainstream audience attract more lucrative deals with broadcast and streaming platforms, while also allowing ESPN to schedule matches on primetime television, such as ABC.

With expectations continuing to rise as projected viewership increases every week, we might see average viewership reach upwards of five million as we head into March Madness on the road to the NCAA championship game.

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Written by

Joy Bassy

Edited by

Sagnik Bagchi