College basketball got another NFL-fueled boost last weekend, part of an overall strong start to the season.
Airing immediately after a Rams-Panthers NFL Wild Card Game, last Saturday’s Maryland-UCLA men’s college basketball game averaged a 1.6 rating and 2.86 million viewers on FOX — the third-largest audience of the season on any network.
Each of the top three games had an NFL lead-in, with the top two taking place on Thanksgiving — adjacent to the two most-watched NFL regular season games ever recorded by Nielsen. CBS drew 6.81 million for Duke-Arkansas following Chiefs-Cowboys (57.2M) and FOX drew 6.50 million for Michigan State-North Carolina following Packers-Lions (47.7M), the two largest college basketball regular season audiences since 1993.
In any given college basketball season, NFL lead-ins will typically result in some of the biggest audiences — particularly on Thanksgiving or during the playoffs. Even just one quarter-hour of elevated viewing after an NFL game can help sustain a larger-than-usual audience across a full telecast. Maryland-UCLA peaked with 6.86 million viewers, far above what one would expect for a game that averaged fewer than 2.9 million.
That effect is consistent across sports; Formula E racing on CBS drew a 1.9 and 3.28 million following Bills-Jaguars on Sunday afternoon.
But while the NFL lead-ins have certainly helped, viewership is also up generally for college basketball this season. CBS is now averaging 1.81 million viewers, up 40% from last year and its highest average at this point of a season since the 2016-17 campaign. (Keep in mind that Nielsen methodological changes — specifically the inclusion and expansion of out-of-home viewing in its estimates and shift to a new “Big Data + Panel” metric — will skew comparisons to past years, especially those before it began including out-of-home in 2020.)
Notably, the network’s increase is actually higher without including the NFL-fueled Thanksgiving game — a 50% jump to 1.28 million.
Its most recent game, Wisconsin-Michigan last Saturday, was the most-watched of the season that did not have an NFL lead-in — averaging a 1.1 rating and 2.05 million viewers.
The ESPN networks — which have not benefited from any NFL lead-ins this season — were up 20% as of January 5, averaging 342,000 viewers (including 781,000 on the ESPN flagship network).
Viewership was up 39% across-the-board as of January 5, an increase that is beyond the range that would be accounted for by Nielsen’s methodological changes of the past year. Even under the old ‘panel-only’ Nielsen methodology that preceded “Big Data + Panel,” this year’s average would be up 20%. While the expansion of out-of-home viewing would still be a contributing factor, the growth is significant enough that it is likely to be the result of viewer behavior rather than methodology or creative scheduling.
