March Madness and the Clark Craze

Everyone’s favorite season has come and gone, and everyone is once again disappointed in their brackets. March Madness is over, with the UConn Huskies and SC’s Gamecocks taking the men’s and women’s titles respectively. However, these titles aren’t the only headlines of this season; instead, the entirety of the women’s tournament has been the highlight. For the first time, viewership of the women’s finals surpassed the men’s. Unlike in my last article, which took a top-down research approach, for this research I started with three specific research questions:

Research Question 1: Is this year’s increase in Women’s March Madness attention, as measured by universe post volume, an outlier or is it part of a larger trend?

Research Question 2A: Why did this increase happen?

Research Question 2B: Does this increase coincide with certain people or entities?

I developed queries that targeted conversations about the women's March Madness tournament specifically, which are presented as I use them throughout the article. I predict that women’s basketball’s social presence will remain elevated, with an eventual shift to future star players like Caitlin Clark.

Research Question 1: Is there an increase for only this year, or can we see this trend in previous years?

Firstly, I began by looking at social listening data regarding the women’s March Madness tournament.:

Query 1:

("march madness" OR (("ncaa" OR "college") AND "basketball")) AND ("women" OR "womens" OR "girl" OR "girls" OR "ladies")

excluding blogs and unknown sources.

I excluded blogs and unknown sources due to some irrelevant narratives showing up in these channels. Replies and shares were included, however, to better measure the scope of discussion around the topic. Infegy backcasts some data to compensate for limited tracking in early years, and thus has more accurate data closer to the present. Acknowledging this, I ran the query over the past eleven years to get a comprehensive yet accurate picture of March Madness posts over the years. Below in figure 1, we see the monthly post universe volume since April 2013:

^{Figure 1: Monthly post universe volume since 2013 concerning women’s March Madness (April 2013 through April 2024); Infegy Social Dataset. Local maxima occur towards the beginning of April in respective years, with the global maximum occurring in April 2024.}

I next analyzed these universe volume peaks within Excel. I forecasted the data for both this year and next to see if we could see this year’s global maximum coming:

^{Figure 2: Post universe volume and forecast for women’s March Madness (based on April 2013 - April 2023 data; April 2022 through April 2024 is shown); Infegy Social Dataset. 2024 actual value is well within the predicted value’s error bounds.}

Surprisingly, despite the apparent shock at the viewing success of the women’s tournament this year, forecasting data indicates that this peak was expected. The forecasted value was a bit lower than the actual at 443,000 rather than 453,000 (Figure 2), but the actual post volume we saw was still easily within the error bound.

We can use the same method to predict next year’s posting data. For 2025, the forecast predicts a decreased posting from this year, but we will still see a lot of hype regarding women’s March Madness with around 385,000 posts (Figure. 2). This is great news for us fans who had a blast watching the tournament this year, and even better news for the athletes on these courts. However, given the fact that many current faces of women’s college basketball are headed to the WNBA this year, this forecast may not be completely accurate. We’ll look more into this later on.

Research Question 2A: Why did this increase happen?

Users posted some 130 thousand more times this year than last year and still considerably more than other seasons. Although this may speak to the popularity of the women’s tournament, I wanted to rule out any other possible explanations. Firstly, I checked if people talked more about March Madness in general this year:

Query 2:

("march madness" OR (("ncaa" OR "college") AND "basketball"))

again, excluding blogs and unknown sources.

Below, we see the monthly post universe volume for this new query since April 2013:

^{Figure 3: Monthly post universe volume since 2013 comparing data from women’s March Madness posting and overall March Madness posting (April 2013 through April 2024); Infegy Social Dataset. Local maxima occur towards the beginning of April in respective years, with the global maximum occurring in April 2018.}

This year, people mentioned the term March Madness – that is, both tournaments – a little more than in previous years, but still nowhere near the global maximum attention that the women’s tournament specifically received over the same time period. Whereas posting about women’s March Madness increased by some 43%, from 316 thousand posts to 453 thousand (Figure 1), posts about the tournament in general only increased by 29%, from 4.2 million to 5.4 million (Figure 3).

To see how the women’s tournament was influenced by March Madness this year, I ran a correlation test comparing daily data from the past 3 months in Excel. This test yielded a coefficient of approximately 0.38, indicating a moderately strong correlation based on the smilar queries. This correlation was a bit weaker than the relationship of the two sets over the past 11 years, which ended up with a correlation of 0.71. Of course, this is only a correlation: from this data alone we cannot tell if posts about March Madness influence posts about women’s March Madness, and vice versa, or if there’s some other third variable in the mix. In other words, while some of the increased attention on women in the NCAA may have come from increased attention on March Madness in general, there is likely another factor influencing this year’s dramatic shift.

Since the posting increase was not conclusively related to March Madness in general, I looked for another general topic that may have had an influence. Landing on women’s basketball in general, I ran another query:

Query 3:

("WNBA") OR (("basketball" OR "nba") AND ("women" OR "womens" OR "girl" OR "girls" OR "ladies"))

again, excluding blogs and unknown sources.

Comparing this to the first query, that concerned with Women’s March Madness, we find the following:

^{Figure 4: Monthly post universe volume since 2013 comparing data from women’s March Madness posting (green) and women’s basketball posting (purple) (April 2013 through April 2024); Infegy Social Dataset. The data sets are moderately correlated.}

With an eye test, certain peaks of this broader third query seem to line up with the first dataset (Figure 4). To confirm this, I found the correlation coefficient for the past 3 months of data to be 0.38, confirming that there is at least a moderate relationship between the two for this year’s tournament. However, this was weaker than the 11-year relationship, which clocked in with a correlation of 0.42. This finding makes sense: as people talk about NCAA stars, they’re sure to talk about their potential future in the WNBA and more about basketball in general. However, this relationship might also operate in the opposite direction, whereby women’s basketball influences the talk about March Madness. My guess is the former, but without deeper statistical analysis, there’s no way to be certain.

Research Question 2B: Does it coincide with certain players or people?

^{Figure 7: Top 10 topics seen in Women’s March Madness posts over the past 3 months; Infegy Social Dataset.}

Caitlin Clark, the de facto star of women’s NCAA, dominates the conversation. She is so central to posts that she out-paces “team,” “sports,” and even her alma mater, “Iowa,” in universe post volume, only beaten by “tournament,” and “game” by about 50 thousand and 80 thousand posts respectively (Figure 7).

Further contextualizing this, I ran one last new query to see just how popular Clark was over the past 3 months. Querying just her name and the names of the top 5 people discussed in March Madness (Figure 6) yielded the following data:

^{Figure 8: The most commonly mentioned people related to women’s March Madness over the past 3 months; Infegy Social Dataset. Caitlin Clark is the most-discussed person.}

In all posts about these respective people (not just within posts about March Madness), Clark dominates the conversation. Even despite her team losing in the final round, users discussed no one near as frequently as Clark. The next closest is Harris, obviously better known as the Vice President of the United States, who still missed out by over one million posts. Meanwhile, the next most popular player, Bueckers, had less than a seventh of Clark’s volume.

Since Clark saw so much social media attention this season, I wanted to look at her influence on the tournament’s discussion. Comparing the query of her name with the first query, I found the following:

^{Figure 9: Post universe volume over the past 3 months comparing data from women’s March Madness posting and Caitlin Clark posting; Infegy Social Dataset. There is a high correlation between the two data sets (0.72).}

Even crazier than the posting volume differences between her and her peers, posts about Clark outnumber this year’s total posts about women’s March Madness by over 2.5 million (Figure 9). Even peak posting volume about her was over 600 thousand more than the tournament’s 96 thousand maximum.

This graph not only shows how much more popular Clark was than the tournament itself, but it also hints that there is a strong correlation between the Women’s March Madness and Caitlin Clark post universe datasets (Figure 9). Testing the data to be sure, I found that the correlation coefficient is 0.72, the highest correlation we’ve seen throughout our various datasets. In this way, by carefully comparing the results of multiple Infegy queries in parallel, we see the power of certain topics – or at least superstar athletes – to shift the gravity of the online basketball world.

Conclusion

Women’s basketball has become more popular than ever before, finally getting some of the attention it deserves. And with this increased attention, the women’s March Madness tournament thrives. Behind a lot of this growth is, as many fans might have guessed, superstar Caitlin Clark. With her and many other college players being drafted to the WNBA, it will be interesting to see if their impressive performances will shift even more attention to the league and women’s basketball – or if this season’s legacy will keep women’s March Madness in the future spotlight.