If the regular-season college basketball ratings are anything to go by, CBS and the Warner Bros. Discovery networks look to be in fine form as they head into March Madness.
According to Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, the NCAA Div. I Men’s Basketball Tournament is primed to tip off with a full head of steam, as college hoops mainstays ESPN/ESPN2/ABC booked their highest ratings since 2018-19. Across a slate of 353 games, the Disney nets averaged 554,000 viewers, which marked a 6% increase versus the year-ago TV turnout. At the same time, the three channels saw their deliveries of fans in the 18-49 demo increase by 8%.
ESPN scared up the biggest numbers, averaging 955,000 viewers over the course of its 131-game schedule (+3% versus 2021-22), while ABC’s five-game selection grew 41% to 938,000 viewers. ESPN2, which did much of the heavy lifting with a run of 217 games, averaged a hair under 300,000 viewers, up 7%.
All told, the Disney nets delivered 1 million viewers or better in no fewer than 57 games, up from 46 in the year-ago period. The ESPN flagship notched five of the season’s most-watched college hoops games, including the two UNC-Duke outings (2.86 million viewers on Feb. 4 and 2.63 million on March 4). Only Fox’s Christmas Day broadcast of DePaul-Creighton put up stronger numbers this season, averaging 2.99 million viewers.
While nearly 90% of CBS Sports’ 280 college basketball games were televised on the unrated cable outlet CBSSN, the legacy broadcast network claimed three of the season’s top 10 games. Tops among these was the Jan. 22 Michigan State-Indiana showdown, which averaged 2.25 million viewers, edging CBS’ March 5 Michigan-Indiana game by some 35,000 viewers.
If CBS and WBD are to go on a spring ratings tear, they’ll have to do so with a field that’s not entirely hospitable to blue-blood basketball programs, many of which are coming off decidedly anemic campaigns. For example, any hopes for a long-shot reprise of last year’s monster Duke-North Carolina Final Four matchup (18.5 million viewers) have been scrapped, as the preseason favorites from Chapel Hill failed to make the cut.
College basketball’s biggest TV draw, Duke, kicks off the tourney with what may well prove to be a trap game, as the No. 5 seed in the East takes on 6.5-point underdogs Oral Roberts. The 5-12 matchup is one of the bracket’s most volatile fixtures; while the higher seeds boast a 0.642 winning percentage since 1985, when the field expanded to 64 teams, at least one of the four No. 12s has prevailed in 20 of the last 25 years. (In 2019 alone, three of the 5-12 dogs advanced, a feat that also occurred in 2014 and 2013.)
Should the networks hit their early ratings projections, they’ll begin selling off some of the reserve ad units they’ve salted away as a hedge for potential makegoods. With the average unit cost up around 5% versus last year’s tourney, CBS/WBD could pocket as much as $1.2 billion in overall sales revenue.
