On a whisper-quiet Monday, not a single live sporting event cracked even the 500,000 viewer mark.
Monday’s Warriors-Spurs NBA regular season game was the most-watched live sporting event of the day with an average of 495,000 viewers on NBA TV, marking the first day since September 20 in which no live sportscast hit the 500,000 viewer mark.
Celtics-Trail Blazers led out with 341,000. (There is no apples-to-apples comparison to the same day last year, when ESPN carried an NBA doubleheader.)
Placing a close second for the night, the St. Mary’s-Santa Clara WCC Tournament semifinal averaged 487,000 on ESPN — down 25% from the Gaels against BYU last year (649K). San Francisco-Gonzaga followed with 305,000 on ESPN2 (-14%).
In other tournament action, the James Madison-Arkansas State Sun Belt title game averaged 377,000 on ESPN — down from last year’s SoCon final in the same window (Chattanooga-Furman: 430K). This year’s SoCon title game between Samford and East Tennessee State averaged 316,000 on ESPN2, up from last year’s Sun Belt final in the same window (South Alabama-Louisiana: 209K).
ESPN2 also drew 245,000 for the Milwaukee-Northern Kentucky Horizon League semifinal, up from Cleveland State-Milwaukee a year ago (216K).
In women’s action, the UConn-Georgetown Women’s Big East Tournament final drew 307,000 on FS1 — actually down from UConn-Villanova last year (318K). The Huskies’ win was an exception to what has thus far been a historically strong women’s championship week.
ESPN2 drew 209,000 for a Texas-Kansas State Big 12 Tournament semifinal, preceded by Iowa State-Oklahoma at 140,000 earlier in the day.
Indian Wells tennis topped out at 197,000 for Novak Djokovic’s three-set loss to Luca Nardi.
Moving beyond the playing field, ESPN and NFL Network combined to average 711,000 viewers for NFL free agency coverage during the 3 PM ET hour. ESPN pulled 449,000 and NFL Network 262,000. Across eight total hours of coverage, NFL Network averaged 186,000.
In debut of the new truTV primetime sports programming block, TNT Sports Tonight averaged 28,000 viewers and TNT Sports: The Line followed with 18,000.
Monday, March 11 sports ratings
Updated chart:
Original chart below (including WWE Raw):
