Michael Jordan returned to victory lane for a second-straight week and the third time in a year, but there is no sign yet that his run of success is impacting the ratings.
Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race from Atlanta averaged a 2.4 rating and 4.49 million viewers on FOX, flat in ratings and down 2% in viewership from last year (2.4, 4.59M). If narrowly, it was the least-watched edition of the race in the three years since it moved into the weekend after Daytona. (NASCAR generally does not benefit much from the new Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” methodology; the Daytona 500 got only a 1% lift from “Big Data” last week.)
Tyler Reddick’s second-straight win, which peaked with 5.5 million viewers, faced greater headwinds than in past years thanks to the Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony. But Reddick’s win the prior week at the Daytona 500 hit a three-year high opposite actual live Winter Olympics competition.
Reddick, of the 23/XI racing team owned by Jordan and Denny Hamlin, has now won five races since joining the team in 2023 — Talladega, Michigan and Homestead in 2024, Daytona and now Atlanta. Not counting Michigan, which was postponed due to rain, two of those four have declined from the prior year. (A previous version of this post mistakenly said Reddick’s Talladega win took place last year, and that Reddick had won only three — not five — races since joining 23/XI.)
It is of course true that viewers do not tune into a race assuming a certain driver will win, much less expecting to see a certain team owner in victory lane. But given Reddick’s high-profile, much discussed Daytona victory — which generated greater social media engagement than usual for NASCAR — one might have thought a bit of momentum would carry over into the following week.
Outside of the Olympics, Atlanta ranked second for the week in Nielsen-measured sports viewing behind NBC’s Celtics-Lakers NBA “Sunday Night Basketball” game (figures for which will be publicized Wednesday).
While the Cup Series declined, the newly-rebranded “O’Reilly Auto Parts Series” posted its largest audience on the weekend after Daytona since 2022 — scoring a 0.8 rating (+7%) and 1.4 million (+5%) on CW Saturday afternoon. That was a reversal from Daytona the prior week, which was down slightly with a 0.9 (flat) and 1.81 million (-1%).
