The Big 12 Tournament scored its largest audience in 16 years.
Saturday’s Kansas-West Virginia Big 12 Tournament final delivered a 1.7 rating and 2.85 million viewers on ESPN, up 26% in ratings and 24% in viewership from last year (Iowa State-WVU: 1.35, 2.3M) and up 13% and 18% respectively from 2016 (Kansas-WVU: 1.5, 2.4M).
Figures include streaming viewership; comparisons are to previous TV-only numbers.
The Jayhawks’ win ranks as the second-most watched Big 12 title game on record (dates back to 1998). The 2002 Oklahoma-Kansas final holds the top spot.
It finished third among this year’s conference championship games, behind the ACC Tournament final later in the night (2.0, 3.4M) and the Big Ten title game on CBS a week earlier (2.0, 3.2M). Head-to-head, it easily topped the Big East championship on FOX (0.9, 1.5M).
For the season, Saturday’s game delivered the eighth-largest college basketball audience on any network. It was the only Big 12 game to rank in the top ten.
In other action, Friday’s Kansas-Kansas State semifinal had a 0.8 and 1.3 million on ESPN — up 55% in ratings and 40% in viewership from the same matchup last year, which aired in a later window on ESPN2 (0.5, 956K).
Compared to the same window on ESPN last year, ratings and viewership fell 55% from a 1.8 and 3.0 million. Last year’s game was Duke-North Carolina in the ACC Tournament semifinals.
[Numbers from ShowBuzz Daily 3.14, ESPN PR]
