Powered by Learfield’s Fanbase™
All eight participants in the 2025 Men’s and Women’s Final Four partner with at least two of Learfield’s business lines (Learfield MMR, CLC, Paciolan, SIDEARM), and those business lines represent at least six of the eight national title contenders. With this many ties across the enterprise to all participating athletic departments, Learfield’s Fanbase data platform has an unparalleled amount of fan data on each of these fanbases that can be used to create authentic connections, inform decision making, and drive new revenue.
With Final Four weekend all wrapped up and Florida Men’s Basketball and UConn Women’s Basketball crowned as national champions, we’ve put Fanbase to work with some fun insights and trends into each of the eight Final Four participants and the 2025 NCAA Men’s and Women’s Tournaments.
Men’s Final Four Participants
1. Fans flocked to see 1 Walter Clayton Jr. and the Florida Men’s Basketball team this season, with a 9.3% year-over-year increase in average home attendance and an additional 1,000+ attendees per game cheering the Gators on to the No. 1 seed in the West and their third National Championship.
2. Duke Men’s Basketball enjoyed a large jump in social media engagement this season with a 130% year-over-year increase in total social media impressions, with an additional boost of over 38% for posts highlighting their Naismith National Player of the Year, No. 2 Cooper Flagg.
3. Houston Men’s Basketball, who reached their 3rd National Championship Game in program history this week, boasted the highest percentage of ticket buyers living less than 60 miles from campus among Sweet 16 teams.
4. Auburn Men’s Basketball, led by No. 4 Johni Broome and 4 more double-digit scoring Tigers, boasted the highest average viewership for its home games among all Sweet 16 teams at more than 1.3 million, a 186.8% increase over last season.
Women’s Final Four Participants
1. UConn Women’s Basketball star Paige Bueckers went out on top claiming her 1st National Championship on Sunday, and all eyes were on the Huskies for the title run as they boasted the highest average viewership in the tournament leading up to Final Four weekend.
2. South Carolina Women’s Basketball reached its second consecutive National Championship Game this season and finished No. 2 in the polls as the national runner-up, but went into the Final Four leading the four national title contenders with nearly 4 million impressions on Twitter/X since Selection Sunday.
3. Texas Women’s Basketball and Head Coach Vic Schaefer, who reached his 3rd Final Four as a head coach this season, saw huge increases in their official athletic site page views during their tournament run with approximately 400,000 page views since Selection Sunday and a staggering 88,000 on March 31 when they took on TCU in the Elite 8.
4. UCLA earned a spot in its first NCAA Tournament Final Four this year, and did so with a tournament-high 3.4 million viewers* tuning in to ABC for the Elite 8 matchup against LSU.
March Madness/Final Four
1. At nearly 17.4 million viewers, the 2025 Men’s National Championship Game between Florida and Houston produced over 3 million more viewers than the 2024 title contest, an increase of 22.9%, while Men’s Final Four viewership was also up 22.4% year-over-year.
2. With more than 7.3 million viewers, the Women’s National Championship Game between UConn and South Carolina saw almost twice the viewership of the second most viewed game in this year’s tournament and is third all-time in women’s championship game viewership, behind only the 2023 and 2024 title matches featuring Caitlin Clark.
3. Page views on official athletic sites peaked on Final Four weekend, led by an astounding 311,205 page views on UHCougars.com on April 7, the day of Houston’s championship game matchup with Florida.
4. UConn Women’s Basketball’s social media post celebrating the 2025 National Championship triumph has the largest number of impressions of any women’s basketball social post this season, generating over 17 million impressions.
