Thursday Night Football had another quiet outing in Week 16. Plus: middling numbers for the NCAA women’s volleyball final; a high for the CBS Sports Classic; and more.
TNF audience on the low end again
The latest edition of NFL Thursday Night Football (Jaguars-Jets) averaged a 4.0 rating and 8.26 million viewers on Amazon Prime, ranking tenth out of 14 TNF games this season. Ratings and viewership were on par with last year’s Week 16 edition, 49ers-Titans exclusively on NFL Network (4.2, ~7.9M).
TNF is now averaging 9.57 million viewers for the season, including 2.12 million in adults 18-34 — the latter up 12% from last year’s average across FOX and NFL Network.
NCAA volleyball title game viewership middle-of-the-road
Last Saturday’s three-set Texas-Louisville NCAA women’s volleyball national championship averaged a 0.39 rating and 786,000 viewers on ESPN2, down sharply from last year’s five-set final (Wisconsin-Nebraska: 0.57, ~1.2M). Over the past decade, the Longhorns’ win ranks a middle-of-the-road sixth in viewership. Three-set sweeps account for five of the seven smallest audiences over that span.
UCLA-Kentucky lifts CBS Sports Classic
UCLA-Kentucky averaged a 1.1 rating and 1.99 million viewers in the back half of college basketball’s CBS Sports Classic last weekend, up from Kentucky-North Carolina last year and the largest audience for the event since 2019 (Ohio State-Kentucky: 2.27M). Keep in mind the two intervening years included a fanless edition two years ago and a canceled game last season. North Carolina-Ohio State led in with a 1.0 and 1.62 million.
In other action, Wednesday’s Michigan-North Carolina game averaged 1.32 million viewers on ESPN — the network’s second-largest college basketball audience since the Champions Classic. North Carolina-Indiana had 1.63 million in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge.
Plus: Golf, NHL, pickleball
Coverage of golf’s Father/Son Challenge averaged a 0.9 rating and 1.48 million viewers on NBC last Saturday and a 0.7 and 1.18 million last Sunday — down sharply from last year, when the tournament marked Tiger Woods’ return to competitive golf after a car accident (1.4, ~2.3M; 1.3, ~2.2M). … ESPN averaged a 0.15 and 281,000 for last Sunday’s Rangers-Blackhawks NHL regular season game, the most-watched of its Sunday windows this season. On TNT, Devils-Panthers and Oilers-Blues scored 267,000 and 226,000 viewers respectively Wednesday night. … Coverage of PPA Tour Championship pickleball averaged a 0.31 rating and 458,000 viewers on ABC last Sunday, comfortably outdrawing its lead-out, Tennessee-Stanford women’s college basketball (0.25, 381K).
(Nielsen estimates from Programming Insider 12.23, ShowBuzz Daily 12.20)
