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As NBC builds a year-round Sunday night live-sports portfolio of NFL, NBA and — coming next month — MLB, ESPN is rolling out its own innovative Sunday night programming strategy, hubbed around the top two women’s pro sports leagues.
Weekly throughout the summer, “Women’s Sports Sundays” will feature WNBA or NWSL games on nine Sundays in primetime, extending a trend of women’s pro sports leagues receiving prominent recurring primetime schedule slots on broadcast, cable and streaming networks.
“This franchise is about more than showcasing games,” ESPN programming executive Roslyn Durant said in a statement. “It’s about building a consistent, high-profile destination that reflects the passion, excellence and cultural impact of women’s sports today, while giving athletes and leagues the stage they deserve.”
Current women’s sports “game of the week” programming models include the WNBA’s long-standing “Friday Night Spotlight” deal on the ION network (which averaged nearly 630,000 viewers per game during the 2025 WNBA season) and, launching a few weeks ago, LOVB women’s pro volleyball on USA Network on Wednesday nights (which set new league TV records during its initial weeks and has averaged 115,000 viewers this season).
NWSL has a pair of notable weekly primetime deals: Friday nights Amazon Prime Video, which launches March 13 for the 2026 season, and Saturday nights on ION. NWSL TV ratings were up 22 percent from 2024 to 2025, and the league’s 2025 championship game set a new NWSL TV record with nearly 1.2 million viewers.
Don’t be surprised by the entirely realistic scenario that a compelling ESPN Sunday night WNBA game — say, Caitlin Clark vs. Paige Bueckers — draws a bigger TV audience than “Sunday Night Baseball” on Peacock, or even possibly NBC itself. (For context: “Sunday Night Baseball” drew an average of around 1.8 million viewers in 2025, the highest mark since 2017, a number that should increase on a broadcast network like NBC but decrease on a streaming platform like Peacock. ESPN averaged 1.3 million viewers per regular-season WNBA game in 2025, and that was largely without the benefits of the “Caitlin Clark effect,” due to her absence from injury last season.)
ESPN’s announcement of the new live-sports property drew attention from all corners of social media, with a lot of sentiment being positive but some uninformed responses related to ESPN replacing baseball on Sunday nights with women’s sports.
The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand produced a helpful series of points clarifying why ESPN’s new strategy makes sense:
• ESPN opted-out of “Sunday Night Baseball” nearly a year ago because it was overpriced.
• They now have open Sunday night spring and summer windows.
• The WNBA and NWSL are their best options — ESPN already broadcasts these leagues — so they branded the night around “women’s sports.” It is not some “woke” move as it was portrayed by some. They already had these sports on, but now are making a set destination for some of these games in light of opting out of SNB.
• A kind portrayal is this move offends some because they love ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball.” NBC is expected to hire Jason Benetti and have local analysts. So if you are sincerely upset and not acting, just put on Peacock and NBC. They’ll do a nice job. Play ball!
• ESPN is a for-profit business. They aren’t putting these sports on out of the kindness of their heart. Post-SNB, they believe this is their best option. You put a Caitlin Clark game up against a mediocre “Sunday Night Baseball” matchup and they may be proven very correct.
