Past the halfway point of 2017, here is a look at the year’s most-watched events so far.
Photo by Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire
The NFL owns the ten largest sports audiences of the year, led as usual by the Super Bowl. In a rarity, neither the AFC nor NFC title games took second-place. That distinction belongs to Packers-Cowboys in the Divisional Round, which had 48.5 million viewers.
Sporting Events in the Top 50Outside of the NFL, the Clemson-Alabama college football national championship earned the largest audience of the first half, ranking 11th overall with 25.3 million viewers. Not far behind, the clinching game of the NBA Finals clocked in at 24.5 million viewers (#13) and the North Carolina-Gonzaga men’s basketball championship had 23.0 million (#15).
Further down, the Kentucky Derby ranks 24th (16.4M), the Daytona 500 29th (11.9M), final round of The Masters 30th (11.1M) and MLB All-Star Game 38th (9.2M). The clinching game of the Stanley Cup Final made the list at #50, the first time since this feature started in 2009 that any top 50 event had fewer than 7.0 million viewers (6.985M). This time last year, the 50th ranked event had 8.1 million — and the Olympics were yet to come.
MOST-WATCHED SPORTING EVENTS OF 2017 Through July 12; does not include streaming SportsMediaWatch.com
Jon Lewis has been covering the sports media industry on a daily basis since 2006 as the founder and main writer of Sports Media Watch. You can contact him here or on the social media websites X (Twitter) or Bluesky.
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The season premiere of the BIG3 basketball league — including a Miami-Los Angeles game that was shortened after an altercation — averaged 560,000 viewers on CBS last weekend, on par with last year’s season average.
Last Thursday’s Dream-Fever WNBA regular season game averaged 816,000 viewers on Amazon Prime Video, the largest WNBA audience yet for the streamer, which is in its first season of carrying Nielsen-rated games. Read more
The week prior to the U.S. Open, the final round of the PGA Tour Canadian Open averaged 2.34 million viewers on CBS — down slightly from last year’s 2.38 million. Third round action drew 1.68 million the previous day.
San Antonio led all markets for the NBA Finals, averaging a 25.9 rating for the Spurs’ five-game defeat at the hands of the Knicks. That figure almost certainly trails each of the Spurs’ previous NBA Finals — the market routinely delivered local ratings in the 30s and 40s during those years — albeit in a different era of television (and Nielsen methodology). Read more
Airing in the window that used to belong to “Sunday Night Baseball,” last weekend’s West Virginia-North Carolina Men’s College World Series game averaged 2.0 million viewers on ESPN — the third-largest audience on record for a non-final Men’s College World Series game. Read more
Wednesday’s Tempo-Fever WNBA regular season game averaged 1.00 million viewers on USA Network, marking the largest audience for a WNBA game on cable or streaming this season.
The latest edition of NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” (Rangers-Red Sox) averaged 1.7 million viewers on NBC, per a Nielsen-measured linear audience and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — the least-watched of the five Nielsen-rated “Sunday Night Baseball” games this season. The previous low was 2.0 million for Padres-Mariners in May. Read more
