Indiana Fever will play 90% of games this season on national TV — it's the Caitlin Clark Effect
Indiana Fever will play 90% of games this season on national TV — it's the Caitlin Clark Effect
Interest is at an all-time high for women's basketball and for the Fever. TV rights partners and the WNBA have leaned into Caitlin Clark's star appeal even before she's been drafted.
The Indiana Fever will be celebrating the 25th season in franchise history on a big stage. They will play in front of a national audience in a record 36 of 40 games (90%), the most of any of the 12 WNBA teams.
The WNBA and its broadcast partners are wisely leaning into soon-to-be No. 1 draft pick Caitlin Clark as well as the growth of the women’s game. The league announced its national TV schedule on Wednesday, building momentum ahead of the WNBA Draft on Monday at 7:30 p.m. ET in Brooklyn.
The Fever have the No. 1 overall pick.
And with Clark, Aliyah Boston (last year’s No. 1 pick) and a growing roster, the Fever will open the season on May 14 at Connecticut on ESPN2.
In fact, their first four games are set to air on four different national platforms: ESPN2, Prime Video, ABC and ESPN.
In comparison: the Las Vegas Aces, the back-to-back champions, are scheduled for 35 national broadcasts — one less than the Fever.
For context, the Pacers were scheduled for one-sixth as many national appearances — just six total, one TNT game plus five more on NBA TV — and they play twice as many games as the WNBA.
Breakdown of Fever Appearances
2 CBS
2 ABC
7 ESPN/ESPN2
8 ION
1 CBS Sports Network
12 NBA TV
4 Prime Video
Stephanie White has been in the game her entire life. She was Indiana Miss Basketball (1995), won a championship at Purdue (1999) and as an assistant coach with the Fever (2012), and was the WNBA Coach of the Year last season with the Connecticut Sun.
She’s also a game analyst on ESPN and Big Ten Network in the offseason. She knows the game because she’s in it.
That’s why she was the perfect guest on the podcast last week ahead of the Final Four and the national title game between Iowa and South Carolina.
That game, by the way, drew more viewers (18.7 million) than the UConn-Purdue men’s title game (14.8 million).
White shared a story about being on the call of an Iowa game earlier in the season at Maryland and how there were hundreds of people in the hotel lobby three hours before the game.
“There’s been nothing like this season,” she said. “It's roped off like it would be for an NBA team or an NFL team. There's security guards everywhere. These people, in the in the lobby of the hotel, just to get a glimpse of Caitlin Clark and this Iowa Hawkeye team.
“Yesterday, I was talking to somebody who said that she’s the Taylor Swift of women's basketball. Like that's how she's being referred to. And from a non-basketball person, right?
“So it’s the craziness of this team and Caitlin Clark’s ability right now to captivate a national audience.”
White’s Connecticut team will open the season at home against the Fever in what will be Clark’s much-anticipated WNBA debut.
Clark is responsible for drawing the most-watched women's basketball games of all-time on SEVEN different networks and streaming platforms.
“This is the perfect storm,” White said of women’s basketball TV ratings. “The needle has been shifting, but it's happening rapidly now. And you've got star appeal, number one. You've got social media engagement, number two. And number three, you've got opportunities to see these players and these stars in primetime locations.
“It used to be if you wanted to find these games, you had to search for them, right? Like you had to be be a women's basketball fan that specifically wanted to search to find these games — whether they were on at odd times, whether they were on sort of back channels of networks and not in primetime locations and not on the big channels. You had to search for them.
“Now, you're seeing that when you put them in primetime, when you put them front and center, that everyone watches. And this is something that we in the business have been have been battling for a long time. And the numbers speak for themselves.
“When you have opportunity, when you have the star power and then when you put these games in positions for people to be able to find them, you get these results. And I feel like we're the needles moving and we're at a tipping point right now.”
Compared to Last Season
Twenty-five of 40 Fever games were available on a national platform, TV or streaming, during the 2023 season. And 10 of the games were televised on Bally Sports Indiana, the regional network partner of the franchise.
1 ESPN
6 ION
5 CBS Sports Network
8 NBA TV
2 Prime Video
3 Twitter
Additionally, eight games were only available on the Fever’s Facebook page.
Breakdown of the WNBA’s National Schedule
ABC/ESPN has a 25-game package: nine on ABC, 14 on ESPN and two on ESPN2
CBS: 8
CBS Sports Network: 12
ION: 43
NBA TV: 40
Prime Video: 21
So… the Fever are involved in 24% of those 149 showcase games. And 90% of Indiana Fever games can be viewed on a national TV or streaming platform.
“Most people who have never watched a W game, if they come or they watch, the first time they watch they’re hooked,” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told me in February. “So you just have to get people exposed to the game and I think what these NIL college players are doing is getting people exposed to the game and their like, ‘This is a really exciting game. This is the way it should be played.’”
This is unreal yet not surprising. I’m sure there are already other cities finalizing their blueprints for how they can get a WNBA franchise. 12 teams is simply not enough but it is if the product is not up to snuff. I think we all would agree that isn’t the case anymore and I’d love to see 16 teams in the next 3-5 years; might be a bit ambitious though. Either way, this is huge news for Indiana as a whole! Good stuff, thanks for your work as always.