The NCAA women’s basketball championship game is finally moving to ABC

Last March’s South Carolina-Connecticut final drew 4.85 million viewers, the biggest audience for an NCAA women’s title game in 18 years.

Dawn Staley, South Carolina's North Philly-born head coach, celebrating after the Gamecocks won the national championship earlier this year.Read moreAaron Lavinsky / MCT

by Jonathan Tannenwald

Published Aug. 23, 2022, 12:22 p.m. ET

After 26 years of being on cable TV, the championship game of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament is coming back to a big broadcast network.

ABC will carry the game for the next two years. Next March’s title game will be a Sunday afternoon tipoff, 3 p.m. on April 2, in Dallas. The women’s Final Four will be Friday night, March 31, on ESPN.

“Scheduling the Division I women’s basketball championship on ABC has been a goal for quite some time in our ongoing efforts to maximize the exposure of women’s sports in collaboration with the NCAA,” ESPN president of programming Burke Magnus said in a statement.

Beth Goetz, chair of the NCAA Division I women’s basketball committee and the athletic director at Ball State in Muncie, Ind., called the news “a benchmark announcement for women’s basketball.”

Magnus noted that NCAA women’s championships televised across ESPN’s channels “continue to generate strong audiences.” That is music to the ears of fans of women’s sports who’ve clamored for years about how women’s sports events could draw big audiences if only they were given the opportunity, through better TV coverage and marketing.

Last March’s South Carolina-Connecticut final drew 4.85 million viewers, the biggest audience for a women’s title game in 18 years. The national semifinals’ average audience of 2.7 million viewers was the biggest in a decade, and 21% higher than 2021.

Last year’s tournament overall averaged 634,000 viewers per game, up 16% from 2021.

ABC has aired some women’s tournament games in recent years, but the Final Four and championship game have been exclusively on cable ever since ESPN acquired the rights in 1996. CBS was the last network to broadcast the final over the air in 1996.

There are two years left on ESPN’s longtime rights deal with the NCAA for a wide range of sports championship games beyond men’s basketball. It is expected — and hoped for by many fans — that the NCAA will put the rights for the women’s basketball tournament into their own package for bidding on the wider market, to see how much money the sport is truly worth.

“We’re committed to 2023 and 2024, which are the only two tournaments we have left under contract with the NCAA,” Magnus told The Athletic. “Under the presumption, and we certainly hope that’s the case that we do renew and extend a deal that includes the women’s tournament, we would continue to do this as a matter of course.”

Next year’s tournament will include another big change in earlier rounds. Instead of the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight being spread over four sites, it will be at two: Greenville, S.C. (which North Philly-born South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley will quite like), and Seattle (home of the perennial WNBA powerhouse Storm).