The 2026 finals of the men’s and women’s ‘March Madness’ NCAA National Championship basketball tournaments remained major viewership spectacles in the US.
UCLA’s win over South Carolina in the women’s final on April 5 generated a viewership average of 9.88 million across Disney-owned ABC and ESPN networks.
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Although it lacked the star power of the 2023 (9.92 million) and 2024 (18.87 million) editions, when the likes of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese competed, it nonetheless achieved the third-highest viewership of any women’s March Madness final ever.
Peaking with 10.7 million, the coverage crucially drew a 15% uptick on the 8.6 million viewership from 2025.
All of this came despite UCLA’s one-sided rout of South Carolina, but it illustrated the continued long-term interest in the women’s tournament, which, across March, averaged 1.3 million per game, the second-highest figure ever on Disney-owned networks.
Back in 2024, ESPN secured a bumper eight-year, $920 million extension with the NCAA to continue to broadcast the women’s basketball national championships, and the continued viewership dividends perhaps serve as a validation for that money-spinning agreement.
The men’s tournament final took place two days later, with Michigan defeating UCONN in front of a strong 18.3 million on Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) networks TNT, TruTV, and the HBO Max streaming service.
The past two seasons have marked a return to form for the men’s March Madness tournament, which faltered between 2022 and 2024 with consistently low scores for the title games.
Indeed, that figure is up marginally from the 18.1 million that watched the 2025 final, and continues the positive trajectory of the showpiece game, which stumbled to a low of 14.69 million in 2023, and in 2024, the final was not even the most-watched game of the tournament.
From start to finish, the tournament averaged 10.9 million across WBD and Paramount-owned networks (up 7% year-on-year), making it the second-most watched edition since 1994.
