On a New York-themed sports Saturday, the overtime clash between Duke and Syracuse was the top draw.
Saturday’s Duke/Syracuse men’s college basketball game earned a 2.9 U.S. rating and 4.7 million viewers on ESPN, the third-most viewed college basketball game ever on the network. Only North Carolina/Duke (5.6M) and Tennessee/Memphis (5.3M) in the 2007-08 season earned larger audiences.
The game also earned ESPN’s largest basketball audience of any kind since Heat/Bulls Game 3 in last year’s NBA Playoffs (6.6M).
Duke/Syracuse was easily the highlight of a New York-themed day in sports. The Heat/Knicks NBA regular season game that followed earned a fairly ordinary 2.6 million viewers — down from the teams’ first meeting of the season on TNT in January (3.1M).
Meanwhile, the third-annual “NFL Honors” earned 3.1 million viewers on FOX, down 22% from last year on CBS (4.0M), and down 11% from 2012 on NBC (3.5M). The 3.1 million viewers is the smallest audience for the awards show, no doubt affected by the NBA competition.
Over on Fox Sports 1, UFC prelims from New Jersey earned 933,000 viewers. Numbers for the afternoon college basketball doubleheader on the network were not immediately available.
Of note, Saturday night’s top sports-related telecast (other than Duke/Syracuse) was “The Gabby Douglas Story” — a Lifetime original movie about the gold-medal winning gymnast. The telecast had 3.8 million viewers.
(Sat. numbers from ESPN Media Zone, The Futon Critic, TV By the Numbers)
