One could be forgiven for thinking it is football, rather than basketball, season, as the SEC and Alabama topped the viewership charts for a second-straight weekend.
Saturday’s Kentucky-Alabama men’s college basketball game averaged 2.17 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest college basketball audience of the weekend and a 55% increase over Texas-Kansas in the same window last year (1.40M).
The Tide’s win, which peaked with 2.6 million viewers in the 7:45 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the fourth-largest audience of the season — trailing North Carolina-Duke on ESPN earlier this month (2.29M), the #1 vs. #2 Auburn-Alabama game on ESPN the prior week (2.76M) and a Thanksgiving Day Illinois-Arkansas game on CBS that had a direct lead-in from the NFL.
On an SEC-heavy day for ESPN, Georgia-Auburn led-in with 1.6 million (+8%), Tennessee-Texas A&M led off with 1.4 million (+137%), and Missouri-Arkansas led out with 1.21 million (+26%). The network also drew 1.39 million for Iowa State-Houston out of the Big 12 (+14%).
In other action, Purdue-Indiana topped the CBS charts with 1.25 million on Sunday afternoon, leading into Ohio State-UCLA at 1.21 million — down 17 and 24 percent respectively from last year (Purdue-Michigan: 1.51M; Ohio State-Michigan State: 1.58M). Oklahoma State-Kansas rounded out the network slate with 1.02 million on Saturday (-44%).
On FOX, Michigan State-Michigan averaged 1.78 million on Friday night — the most-watched game in the network’s Friday night series.
Shifting to women’s play, Sunday’s Notre Dame-NC State game averaged 887,000 on ESPN — the fourth-largest audience for a women’s game on the ESPN networks this season. NC State’s overtime win, which peaked with 1.2 million viewers, increased 56% from LSU-Tennessee in the same window last year (570K). LSU-Kentucky followed with 573,000, up 52% from a Florida Atlantic-Memphis men’s game in the same year-ago slot (378K).
Women’s college basketball viewership is now up 1% on the ESPN networks this season, with the caveat that ESPN rarely aired any games involving Caitlin Clark and Iowa last season.
Note: Nielsen as of this month expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets (up from two-thirds previously). As a result, viewership figures will generally compare favorably not only to past years, but even to past weeks.
