In March Madness, The Women Still Have More Stars And Perhaps More People Watching Too

It's no stretch to say the two biggest names in college basketball these days will be playing in the women's tournament when March Madness goes into full swing later this week.

Whether the presence of Juju Watkins of USC and Paige Bueckers of UConn will overcome the game's loss of Caitlin Clark and drive a repeat of last year's history-making surge in viewership is among the underlying questions over the next three weeks.

One of the surest signs of the growing popularity of the women's game came last year, when the final of the tournament, featuring Clark's Iowa Hawkeyes against coach Dawn Staley's South Carolina juggernaut, drew more viewers than the men's final between UConn and Purdue.

It was a first, driven in part by the fact that the men's game wasn't on an over-the-air network and the women's was, but also thanks to the legion of Clark fans, many of whom have followed her to the WNBA.

"I'm hard-pressed to believe they're going to reach the Caitlin Clark number again, because that was a comet that probably won't be repeated this year," Kevin Hull, a sports media professor at South Carolina, said of the 18.87 million who tuned into the women's title game last year. "But they're going to get a really good number again. It's a great time to be in women's sports."