Did women’s college basketball just have its 1979 moment?

The Men’s NCAA Tournament and the larger entity of men’s college basketball were not always wildly popular. We did not always have office pools with everyone filling out a bracket on the Monday after the selection show. We did not always have four different television networks covering the first and second rounds of the men’s tournament. We didn’t always have a 64- or 68-team field with expansive national coverage. We didn’t always have 60 or 70 thousand people gathering in a domed football stadium for the Final Four.

In 1972, the Men’s Final Four was played on a Thursday with the championship game being on a Saturday. Attendance for NCAA Tournaments — the full tournament, not just the Final Four — was below 175,000. The size of the NCAA Tournament field was under 30 teams. If you think college basketball is a niche sport now, it was far more of a niche sport back then.

A number of events, however, changed how college basketball was viewed and valued in the economic marketplace. A central driver of increased commercial value — and fan interest — in college basketball was the 1979 national championship game between Magic Johnson of Michigan State and Larry Bird of Indiana State. That game not only propelled college hoops into the spotlight; it also gave the NBA the two superstars who would permanently transform professional basketball.

Three short years after the 1979 Magic-Bird title game, the NCAA moved the Final Four into a big dome, the Louisiana Superdome in 1982. Over 60,000 fans watched that year’s Final Four semifinal games on Saturday. Over 60,000 returned for the Monday night final between Michael Jordan’s North Carolina team and Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown squad.

Six years after Magic-Bird 1979, the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams, which is double what the field was in 1975 (32 teams). The rocket ship of college basketball had taken off. Dollars soared. Fan interest went through the roof. Media rights were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1960s, and in the single millions of dollars in the early 1970s.

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Today, media rights (CBS and Turner) are in the billions for March Madness, an instantly recognizable brand.

With all of this as prelude, did women’s college basketball just have its 1979 Magic-Bird moment? Did Caitlin Clark and Iowa, who lost to LSU on Sunday in the national championship game, transform the economics and television visibility of women’s hoops?

Clark and Iowa were ratings gold for ESPN, setting new records and milestones for women’s basketball TV ratings and overall national interest. The Women’s NCAA Tournament is about to become a standalone media property, which is going to make a lot of money for successful women’s hoops programs and conferences. USC could be one such success story.

Only time will tell, but the 2023 Women’s NCAA Tournament and Women’s Final Four could eventually be remembered as a 1979 moment for women’s basketball in American sports.