An eventful Saturday of basketball delivered big gains for ESPN.
Saturday’s Duke-Clemson men’s college basketball game averaged 2.10 million viewers on ESPN, marking the third-largest audience of the season behind the previous week’s Duke-North Carolina game (2.29M) and Illinois-Arkansas on Thanksgiving, which aired on CBS immediately following NFL coverage (5.1M).
The Tigers’ upset win, which marked the return of Dick Vitale to the broadcast booth after a nearly two-year absence, increased 47% over Baylor-Kansas in a similar window last year (1.43M).
Viewership — which peaked at 2.8 million viewers, surpassing the prior week mark for Duke-UNC (2.5M) — was the highest for any ACC game outside of the Duke-UNC rivalry in the past five years.
The game started a half-hour later than originally scheduled to accommodate ESPN’s addition of a Pacers-Lakers NBA regular season game that was expected to mark Luka Doncic’s Laker debut. Neither Doncic nor LeBron James played in the game, which averaged 1.39 million viewers, up 32% from a North Carolina-Miami game in the same window a year ago (1.05M).
As a result of Pacers-Lakers being added to the schedule, ESPN bumped a top ten matchup of Florida-Auburn to ESPN2. That game averaged 1.03 million, more-than-triple Houston-Cincinnati last year (328K).
Leading out of Duke-Clemson, Alabama-Arkansas averaged 1.48 million — up 54% from Tennessee-Texas A&M a year ago (961K).
ESPN also averaged 850,000 for Kansas-Kansas State and 723,000 for Tennessee-Oklahoma in early afternoon windows, both up 7% from last year’s equivalent games (Boston College-Duke: 796K; Alabama-LSU: 677K).
In other action, CBS averaged just shy of 1.3 million for Michigan-Indiana — down 3% from Illinois-Michigan State last year (1.34M). FOX drew 1.45 million for St. John’s-UConn on Friday, matching the network’s Friday night season-high set by Indiana-Purdue a week earlier.
Shifting to women’s action, ESPN averaged 1.0 million for Texas’ upset of South Carolina on Super Bowl Sunday — the network’s most-watched game this season, but down slightly from UConn-South Carolina in the same window a year ago (1.05M). (Keep in mind last year’s game aired opposite a Caitlin Clark Iowa game on FOX.)
The Longhorns’ win, which peaked with 1.3 million, ranks as the fourth-most watched women’s game this season across all networks.
Tennessee-LSU followed with 825,000, more-than-doubling an Oklahoma State-UCLA softball game in the same window last year (404K).
