March Madness is heading into the final stretch as the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has reached its Final Four, with all number one seeds winning their respective regions as they now embark on San Antonio this weekend. Meanwhile, the viewership figures have been released following this weekend’s Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight matchups, and overall, viewership remained on par with last year’s figures.
According to Austin Karp of the Sports Business Journal, viewership for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is flat heading into the Final Four this weekend compared to last year’s figures. However, overall, the men’s tournament is up 3% compared to the same time period of the 2023 tournament.
Looking specifically at the Elite Eight round, overall viewership was down 10% from last year. Nevertheless, it was still up 4% from 2023, showing some fluctuations in audience engagement with the Easter holiday weekend earlier in the calendar in 2024.
Meanwhile, according to Jon Lewis with Sports Media Watch, the Sweet Sixteen matchups had a mixed night. For instance, Friday’s Auburn-Michigan matchup averaged 7.34 million viewers on CBS, which was up a fraction of a percent from last year’s Duke-Houston matchup in the same time slot, which averaged 7.33 million viewers. Notably, the Tigers’ win over the Wolverines was the most-watched game of the Round of Sixteen, as Michigan was coming off a second-round win over Texas A&M, which garnered an average of more than 10 million viewers.
Additionally, the earlier Sweet Sixteen games saw an average of 6.71 million viewers for Michigan State-Mississippi, marking a 4% increase from last year’s NC State-Marquette matchup. However, Tennessee-Kentucky’s game averaged 3.56 million viewers across TBS and truTV, reflecting a 7% decline from 2024.
As for the Elite Eight matchups, the regional finals averaged 9.0 million viewers across CBS, TBS, truTV. This is 10% down from last year’s slate of games, but up 4% from 2023.
This follows the first weekend of March Madness, which was the most viewed opening weekend of the annual NCAA men’s basketball tournament since 1993. Notably, figures released last week showed that by combining the full viewership between TNT Sports and CBS Sports, the average audience reached 9.4 million viewers throughout the second round of the tournament.
The CBS-TNT Sports partnership originally began in 2010 when the two parties agreed to a 14-year, $10.8 billion deal to collaborate on coverage of March Madness. Then, in March 2016, both parties extended their agreement with an $8.8 billion deal, which runs through the conclusion of the 2032 men’s tournament.
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