President Biden hosted the defending nationwide NCAA champions in males’s and girls’s basketball on the White Home Tuesday, welcoming Daybreak Staley’s South Carolina ladies’s staff and Dan Hurley’s UConn males’s staff.
In the course of the ceremony celebrating Staley’s Gamecocks, Biden joked in regards to the ladies’s recreation surpassing the boys’s recreation in TV scores when he referenced the viewership numbers for final season’s NCAA finals.
“The championship recreation was the most-watched basketball recreation within the final 5 years, peaking at over 24 million viewers,” Biden mentioned. “I am going to inform you what, I do not assume anyone’s watching males’s basketball anymore.”
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Biden additionally referred to Staley as a “Philly woman” as a result of Staley is from Philadelphia, crediting that side of her identification for South Carolina’s third championship since 2017. Biden went on to say that he married a “Philly woman,” referring to first woman Jill Biden dwelling her early childhood in Philadelphia.
Biden didn’t make any reference to the viewership numbers through the ceremony celebrating UConn.
However Biden’s jab on the males’s recreation through the South Carolina ceremony was met with laughter and applause within the East Room of the White Home.
CAITLIN CLARK, ALIYAH BOSTON LEAD FEVER TO THRILLING COMEBACK WIN IN OVERTIME OVER DREAM
President Biden and South Carolina Gamecocks head coach Daybreak Staley arrive for a celebration of the 2023-2024 College of South Carolina Gamecocks ladies’s basketball NCAA championship staff within the East Room on the White Home Sept. 10, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Photos)
This yr’s ladies’s NCAA last was the most-watched in historical past and was the primary to surpass a bigger viewers than the boys’s last in historical past, averaging 18.7 million viewers on ABC and ESPN and peaking at 24 million viewers for South Carolina’s victory over Caitlin Clark and Iowa in March. The ladies’s match additionally set an all-time complete attendance report of 436,055 followers, which topped the report set final yr by 78,513.
It was the second most-watched non-Olympic ladies’s sporting occasion on U.S. tv, trailing solely the 2015 Girls’s World Cup last between the USA and Japan, which averaged 25.4 million on Fox. That was additionally on a Sunday and passed off in primetime on the East Coast.
The boys’s championship averaged simply 14.82 million viewers on TBS and TNT to observe UConn defend its title and defeat Purdue, 75-60.
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The Gamecocks ended their season undefeated and beat the Iowa Hawkeyes 87-75 for his or her third NCAA championship below head coach Daybreak Staley. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Photos)
The historic surge within the ladies’s last’s viewership outperforming the boys’s coincided with Clark’s rise to superstardom in ladies’s basketball and different gamers like Angel Reese and Cameron Brink whose recognition crossed into the mainstream.
Jill Biden infamously recommended that Clark and Iowa go to the White Home for their very own go to after shedding to Reese and LSU within the 2023 ladies’s last. The primary woman apologized for the suggestion, however Reese mentioned she was “damage” by it and did not “settle for” the apology throughout an look on the “The Paper Route Podcast” in April.
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