Even absent Lonzo Ball and UCLA, the Pac-12 Tournament final was the most-watched in half a decade.
Arizona-Oregon scored 2.1 million viewers in Saturday’s Pac-12 Tournament final on ESPN, more than five times the audience of Oregon-Utah last year, which aired on Fox Sports 1 and did not have a college basketball lead-in (388K), and up 11% from Arizona-Oregon on ESPN in 2015 (1.9M).
The Wildcats’ win was the most-watched Pac-12 title game since Colorado-Arizona in 2012, the last time the conference champion was crowned on a broadcast network (2.10M to 2.08M). Since the Pac-12 began rotating its championship between ESPN and Fox Sports each season, the three title games on ESPN have topped 1.5 million viewers and the two on Fox Sports 1 have failed to crack 700,000.
Despite the stronger numbers, the Pac-12 title game was no match for the day’s other big games — Duke-Notre Dame in the ACC final (3.6M), the Iowa State-West Virginia Big 12 final (2.3M) or Alabama-Kentucky in an SEC semifinal (2.2M).
Figures do not include the streaming audience on WatchESPN, which inched viewership up from 2.08 to 2.15 million.
(Wknd. numbers from ESPN, ShowBuzz Daily 3.15)
