Caitlin Clark Sunday Debut Up Against NFL

The WNBA set numerous attendance and viewership records during its regular season, as Caitlin Clark led a heralded class of rookies-turned-stars. Now the league will look to maintain its momentum while airing alongside American sports’ biggest attention hog, the NFL.

All four first-round series will start this Sunday, with Clark’s Indiana Fever facing the Connecticut Sun at 3 p.m. ET on ABC. While the Iowa standout has developed a national—if not international—audience, it’s worth noting that the Indianapolis Colts play the Chicago Bears at 1 p.m. Sunday. The latter stages of the Fever-Sun affair will conflict with the NFL’s 4 p.m. ET slate, which includes a nearly national broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys hosting the Baltimore Ravens with Tom Brady in the booth.

Depending on how all of the series play out, up to 13 WNBA playoff games could air against pro football competition.

In part, the NFL has become nearly unavoidable, with games spread across Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. ESPN’s networks, meanwhile, are swamped with college football on Saturdays. Other pastimes—from the World Series to presidential debates—have contorted themselves to avoid competing with pro pigskin, but multiple separate factors contributed to the WNBA’s scheduling decisions.

This year’s Olympic break pushed the postseason back by more than a week, for one, while the league still ensured its champion would be crowned before the start of the NBA regular season (the NBA owns 50% of the WNBA). If the WNBA Finals go a full five games, there will be a single day between the end of the season and the start of the men’s campaign. 

Weekends have also offered the best chances for ESPN to claim airtime on its sister broadcast network, ABC. A record 3.44 million viewers tuned into July’s All-Star Game on ABC on a Saturday, for example. 

“We believe Sunday provides our best opportunity to showcase the WNBA playoffs on broadcast, and so we want to take advantage of that platform,” ESPN head of pro basketball and combat sports programming and acquisitions Matt Kenny said. “And there’s a case to be made that when you have so many people in front of screens during a particular time that there certainly could be a sampling effect this year, more so than ever.” 

The rest of the Fever’s first-round matchup is scheduled to take place on Wednesday and Friday (if necessary), avoiding marquee counterprogramming. 

In the semifinals, however, game two is slated to air on the same Tuesday as the U.S. Vice Presidential debate and the first night of MLB postseason action, one of the select nights not overrun with football.

Given the record interest in the WNBA this year, fans are likely to continue finding the games despite the competition for attention. Each announced matchup is also set to start at different times, allowing viewers to watch all of the action. 

“The playoff windows in particular is a topic that we start talking about a year in advance,” Kenny said. “We collaborate with the WNBA to really seek out the best possible schedule across broadcast and cable while navigating … one of the busiest times of the sports calendar.”

The league will have options to further experiment with its playoff schedule in the coming years, with franchise expansion and a new set of media deals likely to change the multifaceted process.

Across 24 games, ESPN’s regular season WNBA games averaged 1.2 million viewers this year, up 170% from 2023.

Last year’s WNBA Finals, including two Sunday games, averaged 728,000 viewers, making it the league’s most-watched championship series in 20 years.

“There clearly is greater demand than ever before,” Kenny said. “And so we’re not afraid of competition, we embrace competition. We want to do everything we can to take advantage of the biggest megaphone that we can to create awareness for the WNBA.”

On Thursday night, the WNBA and ESPN announced game times and TV channels for the first two games of each of the four first-round series…

2024 WNBA Playoffs Schedule

Sunday, Sept. 22

Tuesday, Sept. 24

Wednesday, Sept. 25