ESPN and MLB are over. The sports network opted to exit its agreement three years earlier than expected, ending a 35-year partnership. NBC will now take over the rights, so what does ESPN do now? Sunday Night Baseball is no more, so what can keep audiences glued to their television screens and on ESPN? Their decision on what to fill in this slot has been met with mockery.
Women’s Sports Sunday? Look, I loved watching the US women’s hockey team clinch the gold medal in Milan at the Winter Olympics, but I can’t watch the WNBA or women’s soccer (via NYT):
Sunday Night Baseball will be replaced by WNBA & NWSL games in what ESPN is dubbing "Women's Sports Sundays'"
— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) February 19, 2026
ESPN is replacing America’s Pastime with less popular, extremely woke, WNBA & NWSL on Sunday nights…
— Jon Root (@JonnyRoot_) February 19, 2026
Caitlin Clark is the only player attractive to a wide range of viewers, and outside the World Cup, professional women’s soccer is even less attractive.
What an awful decision. https://t.co/sYH0MJEW0e pic.twitter.com/YdguaqDHgU
As NBC builds a year-round Sunday night live-sports portfolio of NFL, NBA and — coming next month — MLB, ESPN is rolling out its own innovative Sunday night programming strategy, hubbed around the top two women’s pro sports leagues.
Weekly throughout the summer, “Women’s Sports Sundays” will feature WNBA or NWSL games on nine Sundays in primetime, extending a trend of women’s pro sports leagues receiving prominent recurring primetime schedule slots on broadcast, cable and streaming networks.
“This franchise is about more than showcasing games,” ESPN programming executive Roslyn Durant said in a statement. “It’s about building a consistent, high-profile destination that reflects the passion, excellence and cultural impact of women’s sports today, while giving athletes and leagues the stage they deserve.”
Current women’s sports “game of the week” programming models include the WNBA’s long-standing “Friday Night Spotlight” deal on the ION network (which averaged nearly 630,000 viewers per game during the 2025 WNBA season) and, launching a few weeks ago, LOVB women’s pro volleyball on USA Network on Wednesday nights (which set new league TV records during its initial weeks and has averaged 115,000 viewers this season).
NWSL has a pair of notable weekly primetime deals: Friday nights Amazon Prime Video, which launches March 13 for the 2026 season, and Saturday nights on ION. NWSL TV ratings were up 22 percent from 2024 to 2025, and the league’s 2025 championship game set a new NWSL TV record with nearly 1.2 million viewers.
Don’t be surprised by the entirely realistic scenario that a compelling ESPN Sunday night WNBA game — say, Caitlin Clark vs. Paige Bueckers — draws a bigger TV audience than “Sunday Night Baseball” on Peacock, or even possibly NBC itself. (For context: “Sunday Night Baseball” drew an average of around 1.8 million viewers in 2025, the highest mark since 2017, a number that should increase on a broadcast network like NBC but decrease on a streaming platform like Peacock. ESPN averaged 1.3 million viewers per regular-season WNBA game in 2025, and that was largely without the benefits of the “Caitlin Clark effect,” due to her absence from injury last season.)
Okay, granted, Caitlin Clark will draw an audience, but not every Sunday. People will watch women’s sports, but sustainability is the question. Yet, for a network already maligned for focusing on the wrong things and saying the most PC nonsense out there, this move is par for the course.
