As Women’s Tournament Begins, New Generation of Stars in Focus

No Caitlin Clark, no problem—at least over the long term. 

The NCAA women’s basketball tournament begins Wednesday with its First Four games, and while this year’s event will be hard-pressed to match the historic heights of 2024, the competition will still showcase the sport’s overall rise. 

The 2025 edition of March Madness will carry the momentum of a regular season that included ESPN’s highest average viewership since the 2008–2009 season for women’s basketball, rising 3% from 2024 and 41% from two years ago. Recent conference title games, meanwhile, fell short of last year’s audiences in several respects, but they still similarly showed growth from 2023, when Clark initially burst onto the national scene with the first of her two Naismith Player of the Year awards. 

The Big Ten tournament final in particular between UCLA and USC—the Nos. 1 and 4 teams in the country, respectively—drew the second-largest audience in that event’s history, trailing only a Clark-led Iowa triumph last year over Nebraska.  

Star Power 

Beyond the broader escalation of women’s sports, and basketball specifically, a key element of this year’s March Madness is an even larger group of top stars. While Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese dominated much of the mainstream attention of last year’s tournament, this year’s iteration will feature a deep array of top talent that includes UConn’s Paige Bueckers, USC’s JuJu Watkins, UCLA’s Lauren Betts, and Florida State’s Ta’Niya Latson, among others. 

South Carolina, last year’s champion and coached by women’s basketball icon Dawn Staley, is also back as a No. 1 seed and seeking to be the first repeat title-winner in the sport since UConn’s 2013–2016 run of four straight. The team, however, lost out on the tournament’s top overall seed to UCLA, in part reflecting the new-look nature and rising parity in the sport.

The NCAA selection committee, meanwhile, is facing some backlash for a tournament bracket that places the Watkins-led USC and Bueckers-led UConn in the same regional. Arguably the tournament’s two most notable players, as a result, are set for a matchup in the Elite Eight as opposed to later in March Madness—when even higher viewership is likely—and at least one of the two stars will not be in the Final Four. 

A prior matchup of the two stars in December drew more than 2.2 million viewers on Fox, the largest audience for women’s college basketball this season. There was “no consideration” of those factors, however, the NCAA said.

“It wasn’t about putting [teams] in the same pod. We put them in the spot they earned,” said NCAA women’s tournament chair Derita Dawkins.