Culture
Put the women’s NCAA Tournament championship game on ABC in prime time
The Athletic has live coverage of Texas vs. South Carolina and UCLA vs. UConn in the 2025 Women’s Final Four.
Start times matter in sports when it comes to championship game viewership. The World Series, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup Final, the NCAA men’s basketball title game and college football national championship game, just to name a few mega-events, all commence in a prime time (on the East Coast) television window. The Super Bowl airs slightly earlier (roughly 6:30 p.m. ET) but concludes in the middle of prime time. There is a reason television programmers have historically done this, and it follows the same adage that Willie Sutton used when someone asked him why he robbed banks.
Because that’s where the viewers are.
Prior to arriving at The Athletic, I covered women’s college basketball for Sports Illustrated for more than a decade, including annually the women’s Final Four. The role gave me a window into the sport, and I could see the potential for an economic rocket shot as the players got more skilled and athletic, and programs got deeper. The past three years have shown everything points arrow up:
- In the BCC Era (Before Caitlin Clark), the 2022 title game between South Carolina and UConn drew 4.85 million viewers and peaked at 5.91 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, the most viewers in nearly two decades.
- In 2023, the championship moved from ESPN networks to ABC. The title matchup between LSU and Clark’s Iowa more than doubled 2022, averaging 9.9 million viewers.
- Last year, the South Carolina-Iowa title game drew an astonishing 18.9 million viewers on ABC and peaked at 24.1 million. It was the most-watched basketball game (men’s or women’s, college or pro) since 2019.
The last two title games tipped off at 3 p.m. ET, and there is a strong argument to be made that even with their increasingly huge TV ratings, they all left even more audience attention on the table by airing at 3 p.m. ET, rather than primetime, when more people would watch.
During my years of writing about women’s basketball, I’ve watched ESPN make a bigger commitment to its coverage, from airing more high-profile regular-season games in better programming windows to enhancing its studio coverage with dedicated women’s basketball experts. The company made the decision in 2021 to air all 63 NCAA Tournament games nationally and placed both semifinal games on Big ESPN. Now, the title game airs on ABC. ESPN recognized it had a product with growing mass appeal and acted accordingly.
The deal that ESPN signed with the NCAA last year — an eight-year, $920 million media rights agreement that featured 40 championships bundled together (including women’s basketball) through 2032 — has contractual provisions that the title game will air on ABC. This is a great thing.
But the time has come. Rather than the usual 3 p.m. ET start time — as with this Sunday’s championship game — the title game should air on ABC in prime time starting next year, and ESPN executives and the NCAA should advocate hard for this.
The ABC schedule this Sunday includes new episodes of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” (7 p.m. ET), “American Idol” (8 p.m. ET) and “The $100,000 Pyramid” (10 p.m. ET, and celebrity contestants include Rob Riggle, Luenell, Fortune Feimster and Rachel Dratch). That’s not exactly NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the 1990s.
The Walt Disney Co. would benefit far more in the long run from exposing one of its significant sports properties to a bigger audience because women’s basketball is going to be played on ESPN/ABC far longer than “Idol” and “Pyramid” will run on that network. American Idol drew 4.66 million viewers last Sunday while Pyramid drew 2.29 million viewers. The women’s title game would obliterate this in prime time.
Everyone wants to protect their own fiefdom at Disney, and there are legitimate challenges. Idol may have built into its contract that it can’t be pre-empted. As far as non-NFL programming, Idol also generates more than $100,000 for a 30-second spot, which is robust in 2025 for a broadcast show. So you would need a lot of executives from multiple sister partners to make this happen, but this is good long-term corporate business for the parent company. Willow Bay, the dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and her spouse Bob Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, know well the power of women’s sports. Last year, the couple purchased a controlling stake in Angel City FC of the National Women’s Soccer League. Iger can make this happen very easily if he wants it.
Last season’s national championship game drew more viewers for a basketball game than any since 2019. (Al Bello / Getty Images)
No doubt the afternoon window has produced great viewership for the title game over the last two years, and a 3 p.m. (ET) Sunday tip has benefits, given it is an accessible time for younger fans. (The prosecution has no objection here, your honor.) But prime time on ABC on Sunday or even Tuesday will do better.
ESPN did not make a programming executive available upon an inquiry on this topic, most likely because it is trying to be a good corporate partners. But last year when I asked this of Nick Dawson, ESPN senior vice president of programming and acquisitions, he said:
“The conversations have happened with regard to the time slot of the championship game as well as network considerations for the national semifinals. It’s an eight-year deal, so where we start may not be where we finish. As of right now, our intention is to continue with what we did — the championship game on ABC in that kind of late afternoon Sunday slot, which from a potential viewership perspective our research team has proven to us that there’s not much difference in terms of potential upside between that window and in a prime-time window.”
Though the decision would have to happen at levels above her, I asked Meg Arnonwitz, an ESPN senior vice president of production and the point person for the women’s tournament, what she thought of the idea. “What I would certainly be in support of having conversations about how we continue to put this sport in the best light possible for it to grow and give it the exposure it deserves,” she said. “We should never shy away from having those conversations.”
Added Rebecca Lobo, the lead analyst of the women’s tournament: “Moving the championship game from ESPN to ABC in 2023 proved to be a brilliant decision that took advantage of the newfound popularity of women’s college basketball. I’m curious how ratings would be impacted if the game was moved to prime time. But I also trust the leadership at ESPN to know if and when the timing is right for that.”
The women’s college game is in a great place. The Elite Eight round averaged 2.9 million viewers, the second most-watched Elite Eight on record and up 34 percent from 2023. ESPN experienced a massive windfall with the nexus of Clark and a move of the title game to ABC. A prime time final is the next step. When you have momentum, ride it.
(Top photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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