With women’s NCAA Tournament taking center stage, stars and games delivered in a big way

The Associated Press

There were plenty of people at a movie theater in central Iowa on Monday night, though very few of them were watching an actual movie.

They were there to see Caitlin Clark.

And they weren't alone. Not even close. Millions of people -- 12.3 million, the most to ever watch a women's basketball game, according to ESPN -- tuned in across America to watch the opener of an NCAA Tournament doubleheader that captivated fans like never before. Clark and Iowa, in a national title game rematch against Angel Reese and LSU in one game; Paige Bueckers and perennial power UConn against freshman sensation JuJu Watkins and Southern California in the other.

The winners on the scoreboard: Iowa and UConn, which are heading to the Final Four in Cleveland this weekend. Perhaps the biggest winner: the women's game, which had the March Madness stage all to itself on Monday night with massive star power delivering two games worthy of the over-the-top billing, and maybe, just maybe, adding a few new fans along the way.

"It's a perfect opportunity to make the moment a movement," said former Division I guard Isis Young, now a broadcaster and analyst. "Right now, women's basketball is a movement ... and the movement is really riding on the back of these players that we're watching."

And make no mistake: People were watching. Last year's LSU-Iowa national championship game, on ABC, drew 9.9 million viewers. Monday's LSU-Iowa rematch, on cable, crushed that number.

In homes, in sports bars from Seattle to Miami, even in NBA locker rooms, the women's games Monday night had people staring at televisions. At a sports bar in Indianapolis, where the NBA's Pacers were simultaneously playing maybe a block or so away, most TVs were on Iowa-LSU. Indiana's WNBA team has the No. 1 pick in the draft this year. There's no mystery about who it will select; the city knows Clark will soon be calling Indianapolis home.

"Not only did we have all the TVs on the game, we had them with the sound on, too," said Clara Husson, a longtime basketball referee in New England. She missed her morning flight from Indianapolis to Boston after a weekend wedding and was given two options for a rescheduling opportunity -- Monday night or Tuesday morning.

She chose Tuesday. Easy call. "I wasn't missing these games," she said.

This was not just another night for women's basketball. The buzz built throughout the day. Rapper Travis Scott told his nearly 12 million followers on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that Monday "might be one for the illest days in women's sports historyyyyyyy." And Hall of Famer Magic Johnson let his 5.2 million followers know he considered Monday's two-game slate "one of the best in history."

The games didn't disappoint. Bettors took notice, too -- even a 4:15 p.m. start time in Las Vegas didn't keep LSU-Iowa from setting records, a surefire gauge of whether people had interest.

"It is the biggest handle we've seen for a women's game," Jay Kornegay, executive vice president of race and sports operations at Westgate Las Vegas, said shortly before tipoff. "It's already surpassed last year's final with these two teams."

Had the game been later in the day, Kornegay said, the numbers would have been even bigger.

South Carolina and North Carolina State reached the Final Four with wins on Sunday, a day when the women's game was going head to head with men's tournament games. Monday's slate from an NCAA tourney perspective was all women, two games both featuring star players, not to mention a rematch of last year's Iowa-LSU championship game.

It was a perfect storm. Even in defeat, Reese understood the magnitude of the moment.

"I think it's just great for the sport, just being able to be a part of history," Reese said Monday night. "Like I said, no matter which way it went tonight, I know this was going to be a night for the ages. And just being able to be a part of history is great."