Yankees ratings hit a seven-year Opening Day high. Also: figures for the NIT Championship, High School All-American Game and Division II men’s basketball final.
Yankees Ratings Hit Opening Day High
Thursday’s Yankees-Blue Jays Major League Baseball opener scored a 5.3 rating on YES Network in New York, up 18% from last year (Yankees-Rays: 4.5) and the network’s highest Opening Day rating since 2011. Ratings peaked at a 6.6 from 6:45-7 PM ET.
The seven-year high comes on the heels of YES Network’s highest rated Yankees Spring Training ever. The exhibition schedule averaged a 1.46 rating on YES, up 80% from last year.
Move to ESPN2 Sinks NIT Championship
The Penn State-Utah NIT Championship scored 693,000 viewers on ESPN2 Thursday night, down 36% from last year (TCU-GT: 1.1M) and down 11% from 2016 (GW-Valparaiso: 781K). Prior to this year, the final aired on ESPN.
The Nittany Lions’ win was the least-watched NIT Championship since at least 2011. Unlike in previous years, it faced competition from MLB Opening Night.
H.S. All-American Game Hits Low
Wednesday’s high school basketball All-American Game earned a 0.43 rating and 600,000 viewers on ESPN, the smallest audience for the game since at least 2012. It fell narrowly below the previous mark of 601,000 in 2015. Year-over-year, viewership fell 10% from 670,000.
D-II Title Game Hits High
Last Saturday’s Ferris State-Northern State NCAA Division II men’s basketball title game had a 0.9 rating and 1.24 million viewers on CBS — up a tick in ratings and 8% in viewership from last year (NW Missouri St.-Fairmont St.: 0.8, 1.15M) and up a tick and 5% respectively from 2016 (Augustana-Lincoln Memorial: 0.8, 1.19M).
It was the most-watched Division II title game since 2013 (Central Missouri-West Liberty: 1.3M).
[Numbers from YES Network, Programming Insider 3.29, ShowBuzz Daily 3.30, 3.27]
