The Nielsen scores hit for the NCAA girls’s volleyball matches televised on Sunday afternoon by national-cable-TV channels, they usually produced surprising, head-scratching outcomes.
The match with the biggest viewers on a extremely aggressive NFL Sunday was Oregon at Marquette on Fox Sports activities 1. It began at 2 p.m. Japanese, and recorded 325,000 total-average viewers over 96 minutes, in response to the in a single day Nielsens reported by the @SportsTVRatings web site.
Wisconsin at Florida, which signed on at 3:02 p.m. on ESPN, posted a median viewership of 193,000 over 178 minutes.
Stanford at Louisville started at 1 p.m. on ESPN2 and was watched by 123,000 viewers over 155 minutes.
However these numbers in and of themselves solely inform half of a bigger, extra compelling story.
The overriding takeaway is that in a 23-minute window from 3:02 p.m. Japanese to three:25, when the three volleyball matches overlapped, the mixed common viewerships totaled 641,000. The Nationwide Soccer League guidelines Sunday TV with an iron fist, and holds the “broadcast” trump card within the period of ever-increasing cord-cutting that has eroded cable TV’s subscriber base. The NFL has been the one main TV sports activities property that seemingly is impervious to altering tendencies as viewers have shifted away from conventional linear platforms.
So 641,00 for a so-called area of interest sport is a staggering quantity in opposition to the stiffest competitors that may be discovered on any typical day on TV. Quarter-hour breakdowns of the three volleyball matches would inform the entire story – and it’s doubtless they’d present a complete lower than the mixed averages. Nonetheless, this interprets to loads of the coveted “casuals” selecting to observe girls’s faculty volleyball whereas NFL video games had been being performed on different channels.
Even the viewership of 325,000 on FS1 needed to be an surprising shock to the host channel, provided that its match not solely went in opposition to the NFL however was straight competing with different volleyball on its ESPN rivals.
Right here’s why:
Oregon gained within the minimal three units, whereas Wisconsin and Stanford waged stirring comebacks from two units all the way down to prevail in 5, the proverbial reverse sweep. The viewerships ran counterintuitive to the traditional knowledge that contentious matches determine to be extra interesting to viewers.
Not solely that, however enormous crowds gathered on the O’Connell Middle in Gainesville, Florida (a Gators program-record 10,323), and the Yum Middle in Louisville, Kentucky (9,761), offering scorching atmospheres for the matches telecast on ESPN, whereas Marquette’s match on FS1 was performed within the Golden Eagles’ far-smaller campus venue earlier than a crowd of 653.
Additionally, of the three cable sports activities channels, all of which have “reaches” of roughly 72 million U.S. TV households, Fox Sports activities 1 had the bottom common hourly viewership in prime time in 2022: ESPN, 1.87 million; ESPN2, 335,000; FS1, 273,000.
Moreover, main into the Oregon-Marquette match on FS1 was NHRA drag-racing qualifying that attracted 339,000 viewers. The lead-in on ESPN to Wisconsin-Florida was a WNBA playoff sport seen by 331,000.
Once more, typical knowledge dictates that girls’s basketball would translate higher to girls’s volleyball than drag racing, however simply the other transpired.
All of which illustrates why predicting TV scores is way from an actual science.
The kicker is that on Sunday evening, a total-average viewership of 181,000 over 181 minutes was logged on Huge Ten Community for the four-set slugfest between host Nebraska and Kentucky that included a marathon 71-second level that has acquired important play throughout social media.
BTN might be accessed by solely 38% of U.S. TV households, it averaged 126,000 viewers for girls’s volleyball matches in 2022, and Kentucky-Nebraska aired reverse of a Sunday Evening Soccer sport on NBC that attracted greater than 17 million viewers.
Backside line: These needs to be extremely encouraging numbers for volleyball followers who would wish to see extra of the game on linear TV platforms. The viewerships additionally ought to serve to construct the mainstream viewers for the NCAA title match when it’s broadcast on over-the-air ABC for the primary time in December.
And a be aware about top-ranked and unbeaten Wisconsin, which has performed three highway matches this season, all earlier than report crowds: The Badgers performed at Arkansas and the Razorbacks drew 4,299 followers, breaking the earlier program attendance report of three,015. Then they performed Marquette in Milwaukee’s Fiserv Discussion board they usually broke the all-time NCAA indoor report with a crowd of 17,037. After which at Florida on Sunday, Wisconsin and the Gators performed earlier than an O’Connell Middle volleyball-record crowd of 10,323.