Sports digest: Women’s NCAA tourney final will be shown on ABC – San Francisco Chronicle
The NCAA women’s basketball title game will be broadcast this season on ABC for the first time.
The championship game, which usually airs in prime time, will be played at noon Pacific on April 2. The women’s Final Four is in Dallas this year.
ESPN said it will have the 2023 and 2024 championship games on ABC and would look at moving the game back to prime time in the future but has commitments to entertainment shows the night of the game.
Back in the 1980s when the women’s tournament started, the Final Four and title games aired in the afternoon on CBS. ESPN took over the tournament in 1996 and the title game aired in the evenings since then.
Last season’s championship game, in which South Carolina defeated UConn 64-49, was the most-viewed women’s title game in nearly two decades, drawing 4.85 million viewers. The full tournament averaged 634,000 viewers, up 16% from the previous year’s coverage.
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Soccer player fined,
used ‘gay’ as insult
A soccer player judged to have used the word “gay” as an insult in a postgame interview was fined 2,000 Swiss francs ($2,070) by the Swiss Football League.
The league said its tribunal declined to suspend Lucerne goalkeeper Marius Muller and judged his words thoughtless but not homophobic.
Muller, a 29-year-old German, criticized the play of his teammates in a TV interview after a 4-1 loss to St. Gallen on Aug. 13.
He and his club apologized on social media and the league opened a disciplinary case.
Muller’s statement had not targeted a player, referee or spectator, the league said, “but rather expressed frustration” at his teammates’ defensive work.
College football: Alabama head coach Nick Saban is getting an eight-year contract worth at least $93.6 million, eclipsing the recent megadeal of Georgia’s Kirby Smart. Saban’s deal averages $11.7 million per year, topping Smart’s $11.25 million pay at defending national champion Georgia.
• Washington is going with Indiana transfer Michael Penix Jr. as its starting quarterback for the season opener at home against Kent State on Sept. 3, head coach Kalen DeBoer said.
Golf: Will Zalatoris withdrew from the Tour Championship in Atlanta because of a back issue that flared during last week’s playoff semifinal.
NHL: Carolina signed forward Paul Stastny, 36, to a $1.5 million, one-year deal, a move that shores up the championship contender’s forward depth following winger Max Pacioretty’s Achilles tendon injury.
Tennis: Sofia Kenin advanced to the quarterfinals of a WTA event for the first time since January, eliminating Irina-Camelia Begu 6-3, 6-2 at Tennis in The Land, a U.S. Open prep tournament in Cleveland, Ohio.
• Austria’s Dominic Thiem, playing in his first tournament on American soil since winning the 2020 U.S. Open, defeated top-seeded Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria in the second round of the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Open after Dimitrov retired because of dizziness. Dimitrov was leading 6-0, 2-4 at the time.