Newly relocated to Saturday night, the championship game of the ACC Tournament hit a multi-year viewers high.
Last Saturday’s Notre Dame/North Carolina ACC Tournament championship game drew 3.5 million viewers on ESPN, up 11% from Virginia/Duke last year (3.2M), up 59% from Miami/North Carolina in 2013 (2.2M), and the conference’s most-watched title game since at least 2007.
This year’s ACC title game was the first to take place on Saturday in more than three decades, having moved from its traditional Sunday afternoon timeslot to the Saturday night window vacated by the old Big East. Viewership increased by 102% compared to last year’s comparable Big 12 championship (1.7M) and by 3% compared to the 2013 Big East title game (3.5M).
Notre Dame’s win earned the third-largest college basketball audience of the season on the ESPN family of networks, trailing only the two Duke/North Carolina games. It topped the Big East championship on Fox Sports 1 (414K) by 752% head-to-head.
(Sat. numbers via ShowBuzz Daily)
