Past the halfway point of 2017, here is a look at the year’s most-watched events so far.
Photo by Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire
The NFL owns the ten largest sports audiences of the year, led as usual by the Super Bowl. In a rarity, neither the AFC nor NFC title games took second-place. That distinction belongs to Packers-Cowboys in the Divisional Round, which had 48.5 million viewers.
Sporting Events in the Top 50Outside of the NFL, the Clemson-Alabama college football national championship earned the largest audience of the first half, ranking 11th overall with 25.3 million viewers. Not far behind, the clinching game of the NBA Finals clocked in at 24.5 million viewers (#13) and the North Carolina-Gonzaga men’s basketball championship had 23.0 million (#15).
Further down, the Kentucky Derby ranks 24th (16.4M), the Daytona 500 29th (11.9M), final round of The Masters 30th (11.1M) and MLB All-Star Game 38th (9.2M). The clinching game of the Stanley Cup Final made the list at #50, the first time since this feature started in 2009 that any top 50 event had fewer than 7.0 million viewers (6.985M). This time last year, the 50th ranked event had 8.1 million — and the Olympics were yet to come.
MOST-WATCHED SPORTING EVENTS OF 2017 Through July 12; does not include streaming SportsMediaWatch.com
Jon Lewis has been covering the sports media industry on a daily basis since 2006 as the founder and main writer of Sports Media Watch. You can contact him here or on the social media websites X (Twitter) or Bluesky.
Last weekend’s final round of the PGA TOUR 3M Open from Minneapolis averaged a 2.1 rating and 3.71 million viewers on CBS, marking the largest audience on record for the event (debuted in 2019). Read more
Tuesday’s Fever-Storm WNBA regular season game averaged 1.4 million viewers on ESPN, trailing only Fever-Aces earlier in the month (1.55M) as the most-watched WNBA game on cable or streaming this season.
Last week’s ESPY Awards averaged a 1.4 rating and 2.6 million viewers on ABC, trailing only an audience of 2.64 million two years ago — when coverage was delayed due to a special report — as the largest audience for the event since 2019 (3.87M). Read more
The fourth week of the BIG3 basketball season averaged a 0.3 rating and 596,000 viewers on CBS last weekend, flat and up 1% respectively from last year (0.3, 588K), a figure that is within the margin that can be explained by Nielsen methodological changes. Read more
Final round coverage of the American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament averaged 1.5 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (0.9 rating, 1.50M viewers) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — up 49% from last year (1.0M) and the highest for the event since 2004 (1.6M). Read more
Final round coverage of the Scottish Open golf tournament averaged a 1.2 rating and 1.944 million viewers on CBS last Sunday, virtually even with the live portion of last year’s final round, which ended about an hour earlier than scheduled due to inclement weather (1.943M). (Compared to last year’s full window, which included 45 minutes of replay coverage, viewership increased 16% from 1.67 million.) Read more
Last weekend’s rain-delayed NASCAR Cup Series race from Atlanta averaged a 0.8 rating and 1.47 million viewers on TNT Sports, per the official Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” methodology, and a 0.9 and 1.57 million per the old ‘panel-only’ metric NASCAR is now publicizing — both down from last year’s race at the track, which was not as severely delayed (1.61M). Read more
