USA's run to the Women's World Cup Championship is a ratings boom

Some impressive TV ratings are coming in for yesterday's United States FIFA Women's World Cup semi-final match.  According to a Press Release from ESPN, 3.35 million ESPN viewers tuned in for the match.  What's impressive is that the match started in the late morning hours in the Central Time Zone with over 450,000 watching on ESPN3.com.

Those ratings are damn impressive, meaning that people were taking an extended lunch break to watch a World Cup soccer match, but it has been proven that these United States runs on the global soccer stage does very little to boost the popularity of the world's most popular game in the United States.  If the FIFA Women's World Cup was staged in the Autumn months, no one in the United States would even notice.