Cable Limited Final Four TV Audiences, But UNC-Duke Reached Rare Territory
By David Glenn
After more than 100 years of competition and 257 head-to-head matchups, Duke and North Carolina finally met in the NCAA Tournament for the first time on Saturday night.
A huge chunk of American sports fans noticed.
Carolina supporters likely will remember the Tar Heels’ 81-77 victory forever, in large part because it sent legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski into retirement, exactly four weeks after the Heels also ruined Coach K’s last game at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Television executives will celebrate the unforgettable Duke-Carolina matchup in New Orleans for different reasons.
Although the final numbers were depressed by the fact that this year’s Final Four was broadcast on Turner Sports’ cable outlets (TBS, TNT, truTV), rather than its usual home on network television (CBS in recent decades), the Tar Heels and the Blue Devils still made history.
More Watched UNC-Duke Semifinal Than UNC-Kansas Final
It is extremely rare, in the history of American sports, for a semifinal to draw a larger audience than the championship game held in the same year in the same sport.
The unprecedented Duke-Carolina matchup in the Final Four did exactly that.
Think about it. The Super Bowl, which is responsible for most of the largest television audiences (sports or otherwise) in history, often draws a TV/streaming crowd of more than 100 million people just here in the United States. In any given year, the AFC and NFC championship games COMBINED don’t usually approach the numbers for the title matchup alone.
The same concept applies almost uniformly to other professional leagues and college sports.
In college football, for example, going back to the creation of the Bowl Championship Series in 1998 (and likely longer) and through the first eight years of the College Football Playoff, there has been only one example in which the championship game didn’t have the largest audience of the sport’s entire season.
At the end of the pandemic-riddled 2020 college football campaign, both College Football Playoff semifinal matchups had slightly larger audiences than the championship game, with the Ohio State-Clemson (19.1 million) and Alabama-Notre Dame (18.9 million) broadcasts edging the Crimson Tide’s 52-24 thrashing of the Buckeyes in the title tilt (18.6 million).
Historically, of course, blowouts tend to reduce audience sizes and close games tend to maximize them. The Alabama-Ohio State romp, in which the Tide led 38-17 midway through the third quarter, is the least-watched championship game in the history of the BCS or CFP.
UNC’s 81-77 victory over Duke and 72-69 loss to Kansas were close to the end, one-point games entering the final minute in both cases, yet somehow the magic of the Duke-Carolina rivalry (plus Coach K’s pending retirement, Hubert Davis’ brilliant first-year head coaching journey and the NBA-caliber talent on the floor enabled their semifinal matchup to attract an even larger audience than the NCAA championship game.
The final TV/streaming audience estimates for this year’s Final Four were close, but they made history. The Carolina-Duke semifinal came in at 18.5 million, with the UNC-Kansas final at 18.1 million. The other Saturday semifinal, Kansas-Villanova, had an audience of only 11.7 million.
Although Final Four TV numbers are difficult to find for many championship games held before 1975, and for most semifinal games prior to 2000, the Duke-Carolina game is one of the only non-title matchups (and perhaps the only) ever to attract a larger audience than the national championship game within the same college basketball season.
UNC basketball, NCAA tournament, Armando Bacot, Brady Manek (photo via Todd Melet)
UNC-Duke #2 In Cable History, Likely Top-50 For 2022
With the very important distinction from network TV, the UNC-Duke national semifinal carried by the Turner Sports channels and streams drew the second-largest college basketball audience in the history of CABLE television, which has been a significant part of sports broadcasting since the 1980s.
The Duke-Carolina game also is likely to end up among America’s 50 most-watched TV events (sports or non-sports, cable or network) for the 2022 calendar year, and one of the few non-NFL entries on the list. For decades, NFL broadcasts have dominated that list every year.
The only college basketball broadcast on cable with a larger audience than those of Carolina-Duke and UNC-Kansas from this year’s Final Four came in 2015, when Turner Sports televised the national semifinals but CBS handled the NCAA championship game.
The Kentucky-Wisconsin semifinal drew a Turner Sports audience of 22.6 million in 2015, a much larger number than that of the Duke-Michigan State semifinal (15.3 million) that year.
Meanwhile, the 2022 calendar year still has almost nine months ahead, of course, but the 18.5 million audience for Duke-Carolina would have (barely) cracked the top-50 list for 2021. Again, that’s compared to all televised programming in the United States, meaning sports or non-sports, cable or network, etc., and college basketball doesn’t always make the cut.
Last year, for example, the top 50 consisted of 41 NFL games, all three College Football Playoff contests, two Summer Olympics broadcasts from Tokyo, the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s address to Congress, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and an episode of The Equalizer (which followed the Super Bowl on CBS).
Only two college basketball games made the top 100 last year: the Baylor-Gonzaga title tilt (#70 at 16.9 million) and the Gonzaga-UCLA semifinal (#100 at 14.9 million). Both were CBS broadcasts.
Duke-Carolina Numbers Would’ve Been Much Larger On CBS
It’s impossible to know with precision, of course, but if the Carolina-Duke and UNC-Kansas games had been on CBS, which has broadcast all but three NCAA championship games since 1981, their audiences would have been significantly larger. A reasonable rule of thumb is that viewership would have been about 25 percent higher on CBS.
For example, the 10 most recent NCAA title games televised by CBS attracted an average audience of 21.5 million. Although it’s only a small sample, the three national championship games (2016, 2018, 2022) televised by Turner Sports drew an average audience of 17.3 million.
(Side note: In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, the NCAA championship game often drew a TV audience of more than 30 million, but it hasn’t reached that number since 1994.)
According to industry estimates, there are more than 122 million television households in the United States here in 2022. However, thanks to cord-cutting and cord-shaving, the number of pay-TV households has dropped below 80 million, from a peak of more than 100 million in 2011. That means the Turner Sports channels (TBS, TNT, truTV) and other cable TV options have a much smaller potential audience than CBS and the other free, over-the-air networks do.
TBS and TNT, for example, had about 80 million subscribers in 2000, grew to more than 101 million subscribers for a stretch of years about a decade ago, but gradually have dropped back to roughly 80 million.
Next Time: Hubert Davis And Building The UNC Brand.
David Glenn (DavidGlennShow.com, @DavidGlennShow) is an award-winning author, broadcaster, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, speaker, writer and university lecturer (now at UNC Wilmington) who has covered sports in North Carolina since 1987.
The founding editor and long-time owner of the ACC Sports Journal and ACCSports.com, he also has contributed to the Durham Herald-Sun, ESPN Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Raycom Sports, SiriusXM and most recently The Athletic. From 1999-2020, he also hosted the David Glenn Show, which became the largest sports radio program in the history of the Carolinas, syndicated in more than 300 North Carolina cities and towns, plus parts of South Carolina and Virginia.
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