If you are a sports media nerd, Sunday was an interesting day. The dominant sports programming was, of course, the NFL, with the signature game of the day coming at 4:25 p.m. (ET) on Fox featuring the Baltimore Ravens in a must-win situation against the Dallas Cowboys, who are forever the league’s viewership jewel. It made what was airing on ABC in the afternoon particularly notable — a 3 p.m. tipoff of the Connecticut Sun against Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever. The game was Clark’s first postseason appearance — her league’s viewership unicorn.
ESPN and the WNBA have never had an opening-round postseason game with this kind of interest so I was curious how the network would approach it. If you want credit for growing the league, as ESPN management always does, then these are the games where viewers need you to back up the talk. To ESPN’s credit, it did that for the most part Sunday.
The network sent its top WNBA broadcasting crew to Connecticut — Ryan Ruocco, Rebecca Lobo and Holly Rowe — to call the game, and prior to the tip, ABC aired a 30-minute edition of “WNBA Countdown.” That pregame show provides value for viewers, including what is already a significant storyline in this short series: The Fever entered the postseason with a combined 19 playoff games among its entire roster while the Sun had players with a combined 222 career postseason games. “WNBA Countdown” delivered what it normally does more than not — smart and entertaining conversations between host Elle Duncan and analysts Andraya Carter and Chiney Ogwumike. It reinforces yet again that the time has come for ESPN to air a daily WNBA studio show on one of its networks during the WNBA season, and let’s hope the company finally does in 2025.
Ruocco, Lobo and Lowe were strong as usual. Lobo immediately informed the audience at the tip to take notice of DeWanna Bonner as Clark’s primary defender. “These teams played four times during the regular season; DeWanna Bonner did not match up at all with Caitlin Clark in those first four matchups,” Lobo said. Ruocco immediately recognized in the opening minute what he rightly termed an “egregious decision” by the officials to call a phantom foul on Aliyah Boston that should have been called on Lexie Hull. (The refs eventually fixed their mistake after a challenge.)
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— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) September 22, 2024
The broadcast team called it as you would expect a national broadcast to call it: down the middle. No hesitation on noting a clear Clark pushing foul on DiJonai Carrington in the third quarter. Sun guard Marina Mabrey went off in the second half (she had 20 second-half points and finished with 27, a record by a bench player in WNBA postseason history), and the broadcast grabbed her at the end of the third quarter, which is quality access. The fourth quarter was blowout city. Producer Ian Gruca and director Adam Bryant delivered a quality production, though the production group did this game away from the site (the opening rounds will be produced from studios in Bristol, Conn., and Charlotte, N.C.), and here’s hoping ESPN sends the production group to the game site for future early round games.
The tipoff time meant the game also ran into the early window of NFL games, including a Fox broadcast of the Philadelphia Eagles-New Orleans Saints that likely drew a considerable viewership number. (It was the only ABC game of the opening round.) It’s not ideal, of course, but it is what it is. You can’t run away from the NFL with this much postseason inventory. When the viewership number comes out Monday — I expect it to be high even with the Connecticut 93-69 blowout — it’s going to be interesting to extrapolate the data against the NFL competition.
ESPN’s WNBA regular season was its most-watched for games across ESPN Networks airwaves (including ABC), with games averaging 1.2 million viewers — a massive jump over last year’s games (440,000 viewers). The league had 22 regular-season games that averaged more than 1 million viewers, and if you add in the WNBA All-Star Game and the WNBA Draft, it makes 24 programming events during the 2024 calendar year that topped 1 million viewers (Clark was part of all but three of these windows, per Sports Media Watch). Sunday’s game will be another.
Game 2 is Wednesday with the same broadcast crew. The game is airing on ESPN and tips at 7:30 p.m. (ET). Here’s a sobering thought for ESPN executives and WNBA fans: It could be the last time we see Clark this season.
Ruocco reflected on that possibility when I reached him Sunday afternoon following his call. “I definitely will be thinking of it in terms of the context of the journey that Caitlin has taken, and not just this entire WNBA season but the college season leading into it,” he said. “We’ve basically had 12 straight months of meaningful, engaging basketball from Caitlin Clark. It’s almost going to feel weird to go through a period of time where we don’t have her to captivate us and entertain us because she has been such a central force of not just the sports world but our country culturally for the last year.
“With Caitlin, every single game there is an awareness of how big it is to document her career,” he added. “She’s had an impact in team sports metrically, maybe like we’ve never seen before. You want to make sure you have those supportive examples every game you do of hers. Even today when she scored her first point, I made sure to mention it’s her first career playoff points because she is the kind of player that we may want to go back and look at that 10 years from now.”
(Photo: Chris Marion / NBAE via Getty Images)
