Kansas Jayhawks’ victory over North Carolina set one NCAA Tournament ratings record
Kansas set a record for the biggest comeback in Monday’s NCAA Tournament championship game history with a 72-69 victory over North Carolina, aired on TBS.
The game was also a ratings record-breaker. CBS Sports and Turner Sports said it was the most-viewed NCAA men’s championship game telecast ever on cable television.
“The Kansas/UNC game delivered an average of 18.1 million viewers, based on total audience delivery, an increase of 4% over last year’s national championship (Baylor vs. Gonzaga),” Turner Sports said in a news release. Last year’s title game was on CBS.
The Jayhawks’ victory was the third-most watched college basketball game in cable TV history behind North Carolina’s victory over Duke in Saturday’s Final Four game (18.5 million viewers) and Wisconsin’s Final Four win against Kentucky in 2015 (22.6 million).
The networks said the ratings for the entire tournament (with the 67 games airing on CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV) averaged 10.7 million total viewers and a 17.0 share (percentage of households or viewers watching TV at that time) per game. Both were an increase of 13% over last year, and the 17.0 share is the best for the entire men’s NCAA Tournament since 1994.
The game was popular among streamers, too.
The NCAA’s March Madness Live app set records for the largest audience and most minutes consumed for a single game. The game had a peak of 1.6 million concurrent streams, which topped the record set in Saturday’s Duke-North Carolina game.
This story was originally published April 5, 2022 at 7:33 PM.
