Big audiences for Caitlin Clark and girls’s school basketball lately have some drawing parallels to the transformational Magic-Bird Final Four of 1979.
South Carolina, Iowa, UConn and NC State spotlight star-studded Final Four
The Final Four is right here. Tony Anderson breaks down the most important storylines across the Women’s NCAA event.
The culminating moments of this yr’s NCAA girls’s basketball event would possibly go down in historical past because the time that modified the game perpetually.
At least that’s how some distinguished observers see it, 45 years after they noticed the boys’s recreation change perpetually with a special Final Four in 1979.
Consider the similarities.
Back then, it was Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Their rising superstardom captivated the nation within the NCAA Tournament, breaking a report for tv viewership and setting the stage for explosive development within the males’s recreation earlier than shifting on to avoid wasting the NBA.
This yr, it’s Caitlin Clark of Iowa. She can also be serving to set new viewership data within the girls’s recreation and will equally deliver new life to the WNBA this yr after this weekend’s Final Four in Cleveland.
WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert has seen.
“This is our Magic-Bird moment,” she informed USA TODAY Sports Wednesday.
Former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson attended that recreation in ’79 and sees parallels, too.
“Larry Bird and Magic − can that be replicated?” Pilson informed USA TODAY Sports. “I’m not at all concerned that there won’t be a positive continuation of this type of attention… All this feeds on itself. It grows. It doesn’t just go away.”
Caitlin Clark and publicity
It’s not an ideal comparability. Magic vs. Bird exploded right into a two-star school rivalry that culminated within the championship recreation. This yr, Clark and Iowa beat defending champion LSU and rival star Angel Reese within the Elite Eight, drawing the most important tv viewers in girls’s school basketball historical past (12.3 million). Four days later, Clark performs within the Final Four Friday towards Connecticut and Paige Bueckers, a guard her coach has described as “the best player in America.”
But the high-wattage attraction is equally stirring to viewers, advertisers and even gamblers, serving to the recognition “feed off itself” by elevating the tide of publicity for all boats that profit from it.
In 1979, Magic vs. Bird set a report with 35 million viewers. Now proof exhibits an identical form of nationwide awakening in girls’s basketball.
“I’ve been analogizing that to say this is our transformational moment like that was, which led to big media deals, with led to big marketing, i.e. Michael Jordan and Nike, the ultimate marketer,” Engelbert mentioned.
Yet the ladies’s school recreation has had massive audiences and stars earlier than, within the Eighties and ‘90s, including Cheryl Miller and Sheryl Swoopes. Their tournament games also drew audiences of seven to 12 million on CBS when there were far fewer media channels and no social media. Huge growth didn’t observe.
“The question for me more is, `How sustainable is this?’” mentioned Cheryl Cooky, a professor at Purdue who has co-authored a study on media coverage of women’s sports. “Is this another peak that’s going to be followed by a valley? Or is this truly sort of an upward trajectory where we see increases happening over time?”
This time is likely to be completely different
For instance:
◾ Two of the highest 4 most-watched girls’s school basketball video games of all time featured Clark towards Reese – final yr within the ultimate recreation (practically 10 million on common) and Monday within the Elite Eight (12.3 million).
◾ Forty new advertisers are shopping for time within the girls’s Final Four this weekend with ABC or ESPN. The Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC and ESPN, confirmed to USA TODAY Sports that stock for these video games bought out sooner than ever earlier than. Disney additionally confirmed that income from these gross sales greater than doubled from final yr and has greater than tripled over the previous three years.
◾ GroupM, a distinguished media funding group, introduced final week a dedication to double funding in annual girls’s sports activities promoting. It plans to do it with purchasers resembling Adidas, Ally, Coinbase, Discover, Google, Mars, Nationwide, Unilever and Universal Pictures.
The firm cited peaks in viewership and mentioned it could collaborate with media companions to assist “drive the discovery, promotion and monetization of women’s sports.“
◾ Gambling, which helps drive sports viewership, is also skyrocketing for women’s basketball and wasn’t even legal in most of the nation until after May 2018. The betting handle on women’s college basketball is up 14 times more than last year as of March, according to DraftKings. The LSU-Iowa game Monday was the most bet-on women’s college basketball game in DraftKings Sportsbook history and was on par with many NFL games from last season in terms of betting handle.
“When you treat us like a sport, you will get a return on your investment,” mentioned South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, whose undefeated crew faces North Carolina State within the different nationwide semifinal Friday. “Women’s basketball is in high demand. People want to see it. People want to see it live, and people want to see it across the airways.”
’50 years within the making’
In different phrases, publicity and funding are peaking for ladies’s school basketball after a long time of under-investment, neglect and occasional matches and begins.
By comparability, the boys’s recreation has reaped the advantages of publicity and funding for many years longer. And it wasn’t till 1972 that Title IX banned intercourse discrimination in colleges.
The first NCAA Tournament for the boys got here in 1939, in comparison with 1982 for the ladies, who beforehand competed for championships within the now-defunct Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. By 1954, the boys received their first nationwide championship recreation on nationwide TV, in comparison with 1982 for the ladies.
“Remember, we just celebrated the 50th anniversary of Title IX,” mentioned former Georgia Tech coach Bernadette McGlade, now the commissioner of the Atlantic 10 Conference. “This has been 50 years in the making. It hasn’t been a flash in the pan just overnight.”
It nonetheless would possibly appear to be it typically. In 2019, the proportion of airtime dedicated to girls’s sports activities on sports activities information exhibits and ESPN’s SportsHeart was lower than 6%, in keeping with a examine by the University of Southern California and Purdue. In 2021, a report commissioned by the NCAA discovered that the governing physique of school sports activities “prioritizes men’s basketball” and it was “considerably undervaluing girls’s basketball as an asset.”
The NCAA didn’t even use the favored advertising time period “March Madness” to advertise the ladies’s recreation till 2022.
So what’s altering?
For starters, it helps to not preserve under-promoting half of the potential market by gender.
“Their superstars were not getting the kind of promotion they are getting today,” Pilson informed USA TODAY Sports. “They and the industry have learned a lot from the NBA and NFL (which have been around longer). They’ve learned that the public responds to the athletes. They learned that the athletes are the shooting stars in their sport.”
The rise of social media and on-line streaming providers additionally allowed girls’s basketball to achieve extra folks, versus 30 years in the past, when newspaper and TV firms basically acted as gatekeepers of what sports activities received coated and what didn’t.
Sports editors and TV executives again then had restricted house and time for protection, forcing them to make decisions. And they’d attempt to justify the protection disparity between males’s and girls’s basketball by pointing to the attendance figures. For instance, in 1994, the Division I males’s recreation drew a median of about 5,500 in comparison with about 1,100 for the ladies, in keeping with NCAA data.
But the reverse additionally may very well be true: Attendance lagged as a result of the sport wasn’t promoted like the boys. Similarly, gamers on the nice Tennessee and UConn groups of the Nineties and early 2000s may need gotten extra nationwide traction if TikTok, Instagram and different social media have been round to attach them with extra followers again then.
Endorsement offers assist, too. They weren’t allowed for faculty gamers till 2021, however now they assist brighten the highlight for some star gamers, resembling Clark with Nike and State Farm insurance coverage.
But will it final?
This is the place the Magic-Bird comparability faces its second of fact. After Clark, will the ladies’s school recreation maintain this degree of curiosity?
The males’s recreation exploded in reputation after Magic and Bird within the Eighties, particularly after CBS gained the tv rights to the boys’s event in 1982. Other stars and storylines got here alongside to drive curiosity, pumping up the boys’s postseason into the industrial behemoth it’s now.
With Clark on the way in which to the WNBA, Bueckers and others are left to assist carry it, together with Southern California’s JuJu Watkins, a freshman who ranked second nationally in scoring this season behind Clark with 27.1 factors per recreation.
The NCAA additionally has invested extra however nonetheless must do extra, in keeping with supporters of the ladies’s recreation.
In the final three years, the NCAA has elevated the funding in simply a few of the main championship areas for ladies’s basketball by greater than $14 million yearly, mentioned Lynn Holzman, the NCAA’s vice chairman of ladies’s basketball.
The Final Four begins Friday in prime time on ESPN, beginning with South Carolina (36-0) towards North Carolina State (31-6). Iowa (33-4) vs. UConn (33-5) follows.
“It is an event and a place that people want to be because of the historic performances that we are seeing by these individuals and these teams,” Holzman mentioned. “So it’s awesome. It’s wonderful.”
Contributing: Steve Berkowitz
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: [email protected]
