ESPN Replaces Sunday Night Baseball With Women Sports Sundays for Nine Weeks
ESPN VP Susie Piotrkowski announced the network is filling its former Sunday Night Baseball slot with women's sports games and studio programming for nine weeks, framing it as the network's version of Monday Night Football for the category. ESPN had its best-ever WNBA regular season and playoff ratings in 2025, even after Caitlin Clark went out injured in July. Piotrkowski specifically cited data showing that viewership growth was not dependent on any single athlete. The Women Sports Sundays franchise launches ahead of the WNBA season.
Why it matters
ESPN giving a nine-week primetime franchise slot to women's sports is a media rights commitment, not just editorial coverage. Brand inventory adjacent to that programming will be priced accordingly, and endorsement valuations for women's athletes should move in response. For agents repping female athletes or creators in the women's sports space, this is the institutional data point to use in brand conversations: ESPN is not doing this as a PR gesture, they are doing it because the ratings justify the slot. That argument directly supports higher asking rates and longer exclusivity windows for women's sports clients.
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