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The early rounds of March Madness didn’t feature many bracket-destroying upsets — but TV viewers didn’t seem to mind.
The first two rounds of men’s NCAA basketball tournament on CBS, TBS, TNT and TruTV drew their biggest audience in more than 30 years. The women’s tournament on ESPN and ABC has fallen off from last year’s record-setting ratings, but it’s also running well ahead of every other year for the past decade-plus.
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Through Sunday’s second-round games, the men’s games have averaged 9.4 million viewers across the four networks, the highest mark for the opening weekend since 1993. There are a couple of caveats there, as CBS was the sole broadcaster for the tournament until 2011 and Nielsen didn’t include out-of-home ratings in its totals until a few years ago. Nonetheless, the tournament is up from 9.04 million viewers at the same point last year, a gain of 4 percent. The high so far is 15.3 million for Sunday’s late afternoon window, led by Kentucky’s victory over Illinois.
The first round of the women’s tournament, meanwhile, averaged 367,000 viewers on ESPN outlets and ABC — down from 469,000 for last year’s first round but significantly better than 2023 (256,000) and any other year dating back to 2013. Connecticut’s first-round blowout of Arkansas State led the way with 1.1 million viewers on ABC. Complete figures for round two, which concluded Monday night, weren’t available at publication time.
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