The Ratings Game

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

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