The ratings game

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

Last weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race from Pocono (Pa.) averaged a 1.66 million viewers on Prime Video, per the Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” methodology that is now the official currency, and 1.63 million on using the previous ‘panel only’ methodology now being publicized by NASCAR. The 2% difference is by far the smallest for a race on Prime Video this season, after the first three races saw a “Big Data” lift of 15-21 percent. Read more

Last Sunday’s Alexander Zverev-Flavio Cobolli French Open men’s final averaged 1.3 million viewers on TNT Sports, down 25% from last year’s higher-profile #1 vs. #2 pairing of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. Read more

The NCAA college baseball super regionals averaged 608,000 viewers on the ESPN networks, up 31% from last year, and the highest average for the round since 2009. (Note that changes in Nielsen methodology skew comparisons to past years.) Read more

Last weekend’s final round of the U.S. Women’s Open averaged 1.3 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (0.8 rating, 1.25M viewers) and a streaming audience tracked by Adobe Analytics — trailing only 2023 (1.6M) as the highest for the event since Michelle Wie’s win in 2014 (2.0M). Read more