Week 4 Wrap: CBS Has Biggest Decline of the Season For Singleheader

The NCAA softball super regionals averaged 695,000 viewers last week, up 48% from last year and the highest average on record for the round. This year produced the three most-watched individual super regional games, led by Arizona State-Texas Game 3 on ESPN last Sunday evening at a 0.7 rating and 1.28 million viewers. Read more

Last Monday’s Princeton-Notre Dame NCAA men’s lacrosse national championship averaged 778,000 viewers on ESPN, up 37% from last year and officially the highest for the event since 2007. Read more

Leading out of the Indianapolis 500, last Sunday’s Louisville-Dallas UFL regular season game averaged a 0.8 rating and 1.59 million viewers on FOX — the largest regular season audience in the three-year history of the league. Viewership increased 18% from last year’s Indy 500 lead-out, Houston-D.C. (1.35M).

Last weekend’s edition of MLB on FOX averaged a 1.2 rating and 2.4 million viewers on FOX, up from last year’s equivalent window (2.3M), albeit within the margin that can be explained by Nielsen methodological changes. Read more

Last weekend’s Wings-Liberty WNBA regular season game averaged 1.3 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-estimated linear audience (0.7 rating, 1.19M viewers) and a streaming audience tracked by Adobe Analytics — the second-largest audience of the season, behind Wings-Fever on ABC the opening Saturday of play. Read more

Tuesday’s Spurs-Thunder NBA Western Conference Finals Game 5 averaged a combined 10.24 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-estimated linear audience (7.96M) and a streaming audience tracked by Adobe Analytics (2.28M), marking the largest audience for a Game 5 in the conference finals since Celtics-Heat on ESPN in 2012 (10.25M) and the most-watched Game 5 of the WCF since Lakers-Kings on NBC in 2002 (14.59M). It was the first conference final Game 5 on broadcast television since that 2002 postseason. Read more

Final round coverage of the PGA TOUR Byron Nelson averaged 3.50 million viewers on CBS, up 20% from last year and the highest average for the event since 2004. (Note that Nielsen methodological changes skew comparisons to all past years, particularly those prior to 2020, when the company began including out-of-home viewing in its estimates.) Read more