Direct lead-ins from the two most-watched NFL regular season games on record lifted college basketball to its two-largest regular season audiences in more than 30 years.
Last week’s Thanksgiving night Duke-Arkansas men’s college basketball game averaged a 2.4 rating and 6.81 million viewers on CBS, marking the largest regular season college basketball audience in 32 years — since Purdue-Indiana drew 7.2 million on CBS in February 1993. The Blue Devils’ comeback win peaked with 15.36 million in the first quarter-hour, about 15 minutes after the end of the preceding Chiefs-Cowboys NFL game that drew a 15.1 and regular season record 57.23 million.
Viewership increased 32% from last year’s Thanksgiving matchup on CBS, Illinois-Arkansas, which also had a direct lead-in from the NFL (5.17M). But last year’s game followed the early Thanksgiving NFL window, putting it in direct competition with the higher-viewed Cowboys game. This year’s game followed the Cowboys, meaning not only a stronger lead-in but also weaker competition from the lesser-watched primetime NFL window.
Beyond the timeslot and lead-in changes, viewership was no doubt helped by Nielsen’s February expansion of out-of-home viewing, a factor that is particularly significant on holidays with high levels of co-viewing like Thanksgiving.
Earlier in the day, FOX averaged 6.50 million for Michigan State-North Carolina — trailing only Duke-Arkansas as the most-watched regular season college game since ’93. The Spartans’ win led out of the Packers-Lions game on FOX, which at 47.7 million viewers delivered the second-largest NFL regular season audience on record.
(The initial audience of 5.49 million reported for Michigan State-North Carolina was a fast-national figure that did not use Nielsen’s new “Big Data + Panel” methodology, which adds data from smart TVs and set-top boxes to the traditional Nielsen panel. While “Big Data + Panel” does not always guarantee an increase over the traditional panel-only number, the lift in this particular case was 18 percent.)
If particularly pronounced due to the Thanksgiving holiday, NFL lead-ins are a consistent driver of viewership records. Days before Thanksgiving, the NFL singleheader window boosted a SailGP event on CBS to nearly 3.5 million viewers — the largest sailing audience since 1992. The prior month, the Professional Bull Riders Tour scored its largest audience on record when 2.71 million tuned in following another NFL singleheader.
Across all levels, the games rank as the second and third most-watched regular season basketball telecasts in the past five years, trailing only last year’s Lakers-Warriors Christmas Day NBA game on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 (7.91M). That game did not face NFL competition, but it also had no NFL lead-in (and predated Nielsen’s expansion of out-of-home viewing).
The games also outdrew all of the prior week’s college football matchups, with the obvious caveat that college football games cannibalize each other (and do not benefit from NFL lead-ins). The top college football game on the weekend before Thanksgiving was Arkansas-Texas with 5.61 million.
In other college basketball action, men’s competition at the Thanksgiving week Players Era Festival averaged 322,000 on TNT Sports — more-than-doubling last year, with TNT alone averaging 445,000 (+180%). This year’s Players Era field was considerably larger than last year and included several prominent teams.
The Michigan-Gonzaga title game averaged 1.1 million viewers on the night before Thanksgiving, preceded by Kansas-Tennessee at 926,000. Including a pair of games the previous night — Tennessee-Houston at 798,000 and Auburn-Michigan at 787,000 — the festival delivered the four largest men’s college basketball audiences on TNT Sports.
