When it comes to WNBA viewership, Caitlin Clark is the needle.
Sure, women’s basketball — both college and pro — has seen tremendous growth recently in games not featuring the Indiana Fever star. But Clark is still far and away the biggest draw in the sport.
Of the 22 regular season audiences that averaged over one million viewers last season, Clark played in 19 of them. Game 2 of the Fever’s first round series against the Connecticut Sun, Clark’s final game of the season, averaged 2.54 million viewers, the most-watched WNBA game ever on ESPN. That audience was about 400,000 people greater than a champion-crowning Game 5 of the WNBA Finals between the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx (2.15 million viewers), the second most-watched WNBA game ever on ESPN.
The Clark phenomenon is something that sports viewership hasn’t seen since Tiger Woods began his reign of supremacy in men’s professional golf.
And FS1 host Colin Cowherd thinks the WNBA should take full advantage of Clark’s ratings dominance. Discussing the recent news that Clark will feature in 41 nationally televised or streamed games (out of 44 total games) this upcoming season, Cowherd suggested that the WNBA should simply sell a package of Caitlin Clark games.
“If I was the WNBA, I would have considered a separate television package to a network on just Caitlin Clark games.” – Colin Cowherd pic.twitter.com/aTuXa3sekC
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 24, 2025
“If I was the WNBA, I would have considered a separate television package to a network on just Caitlin Clark games,” Cowherd said.
“I would’ve bought it,” co-host Jason McIntyre replied.
“I would’ve had two packages. The WNBA package, and then a separate, let’s say 15 to 18 game Caitlin Clark package for, you know, it could be HBO it could be Fox it could be anybody. I would’ve sold a separate Caitlin Clark package,” Cowherd suggested.
There are, of course, a couple obstacles that would prevent Cowherd’s imaginative proposal from coming true. First and foremost, the majority of the WNBA’s media rights are tied up in the NBA media rights deals. If the WNBA were to, hypothetically, carve out a Clark-only package, that would necessarily mean fewer Clark games for ESPN, NBC, and Amazon, who will begin paying the NBA a combined $7 billion per year next season. That wouldn’t exactly be met with great enthusiasm from those partners.
The WNBA’s other two rights partners, CBS and ION, surely wouldn’t take well to fewer Clark games either. Given that CBS and ION are the only broadcast partners outside of the NBA deals, they’re the only partners paying a true market rate for WNBA games. As such, it behooves the WNBA to reward them with more Clark games rather than consolidate that inventory to sell to a single partner.
And that’s really where Cowherd’s proposal breaks down. Even if the WNBA weren’t tied into the NBA rights deals, the league would likely be better off guaranteeing a little bit of Caitlin Clark inventory to five separate partners than it would be selling the majority of Clark inventory to one partner at a premium.
Not only does this keep everybody happy, but it increases the value of non-Clark inventory. Networks can strategically use games that Clark appears in to lead into or out of other WNBA games.
Now, it’s easy to see where Cowherd was coming from. Games featuring Caitlin Clark simply draw much larger audiences than other WNBA games. Any network would be interested in a package that includes only the WNBA’s premier inventory.
But that would effectively devalue the rest of the WNBA’s packages. That’s not a great strategy for a league trying to maximize reach and grow its fan base by partnering with several prominent media companies.
So while Cowherd is certainly business savvy in his own right, creating a mini podcast empire in The Volume on top of his FS1 gig, he didn’t exactly hit the mark on how the WNBA should best allocate its Caitlin Clark inventory.
