Old games are drawing less and less, as one would expect.
NBC averaged a 0.64 rating and 905,000 viewers last Saturday and a 0.63 and 894,000 last Sunday for rebroadcasts of last year’s PGA Tour/WGC Match Play, both trailing the previous two weekends. Rebroadcasts of the 2018 Tampa Bay Championship and 2019 Players Championship each attracted over one million viewers.
The broadcasts were the most-watched encores of the week. They ranked third and fourth for the week overall among sports programs, behind a live NASCAR simulation on FOX and FS1 (0.8, 1.34M) and a re-air of the ESPN 30 For 30 “Celtics/Lakers: Best of Enemies” on ABC (0.8, 1.18M).
Also down week over week were NCAA Tournament rebroadcasts on CBS. Last Sunday’s line-up of old national championship games topped out at a 0.50 and 750,000 for the 1985 Villanova-Georgetown final — behind each of the six rebroadcasts the network aired the previous weekend.
CBS also drew a 0.43 and 693,000 for the 2010 Duke-Butler title game and a 0.43 and 663,000 for the 1997 Arizona-Kentucky final.
ESPN last Sunday night averaged a 0.44 and 720,000 for Wrestlemania 32, a 14% drop in viewership from Wrestlemania 30 the previous week (839K).
Elsewhere last weekend, an encore of Super Bowl 51 on FOX (Patriots-Falcons) averaged a 0.46 and 727,000 before being cut off for breaking news coverage. The remaining portion then averaged a 0.49 and 820,000.
An encore of the 2018 United States-Canada Olympic women’s hockey final averaged a 0.48 and 722,000 on NBC — not far off the 0.52 and 727,000 the network averaged for a live Rangers-Flyers game in the same window last year. Keep in mind that last year’s NHL game faced competition from the NCAA Tournament Elite Eight.
Shifting to the workweek, ESPN on Monday averaged a 0.29 and 437,000 for a 2018 Chiefs-Rams Monday Night Football game. On Wednesday, it averaged a 0.28 and 434,000 for Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals (Cavaliers-Warriors) and a 0.25 and 401,000 for Game 5 of the same series.
ESPN also averaged 239,000 for a Tuesday rebroadcast of a 2001 Braves-Mets Major League Baseball game — the first sporting event in New York City after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — and 371,000 for the 2006 Texas-USC Rose Bowl.
[Numbers from ShowBuzz Daily 3.31, 4.1, 4.3; Programming Insider 4.3 a, b]
