Hamel: What we know, don’t know about record-smashing NCAA volleyball TV ratings
Michigan had plenty to celebrate when it beat Ohio State at home Sunday and plenty of TV viewers saw it happen/Michigan photo
What we do know about the record-smashing TV numbers posted Sunday for NCAA women’s volleyball is that 1.659 million watched the landmark telecast on over-the-air Fox.
That’s earth-shattering news for fans of the fast-rising sport.
As for what we don’t know about the telecast, hang on, it’s important, and we’ll get to that later.
But first, the Nielsen ratings also told us that women’s volleyball absolutely blew away EVERYTHING televised in sports that day not called the National Football League in the “prime” 18-49 demographic. The 18-49 demo is highly coveted by advertisers because their marketing surveys tell them younger viewers are more easily influenced by ads and it is the largest age group at roughly 130 million.
Performance in the key demo is considered even more critical than overall viewership to television decision-makers, in that it heavily influences the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) that is a significant component of the formula that determines how much TV channels charge for a 30-second ad spot.
On Sunday, the volleyball telecast on Fox posted a rating of .44 in the 18-49 demo. In the shifting landscape of linear television, that rating is stupendous, even if it means that fewer than one-half-of-one-percent of the potential viewership pool in 18-49 tuned in, as determined by Nielsen’s scientific sampling of U.S. TV households.
RATINGS SPIKE: Sunday’s @bigten women’s volleyball slate featuring @OhioStateWVB at @umichvball and @GopherVBall at @BadgerVB scored 1,659,000 viewers on FOX – the most-viewed regular season women’s college volleyball telecast in history pic.twitter.com/qzHtm1jIzx
— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) October 31, 2023
That .44 rating blistered the “prime demo” numbers put up on Sunday by the NASCAR Cup playoff race from the venerable Martinsville short track on NBC (.21 with a total-average viewership of 2.196 million), Formula One’s Mexican Grand Prix on ABC (.25/1.080 million), an English Premier League soccer match on USA Network (.10/345,000), an NHL game between the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers on TBS (.10/271,000), a soccer friendly between the U.S. women’s national team and Colombia on TNT (.06/235,000) and an NBA game between the San Antonio Spurs (with 7-foot-4 rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama) and Los Angeles Clippers on NBA-TV (.09/207,000).
The margins between women’s volleyball and the NASCAR and Formula One events were particularly telling, in that both auto races aired in the afternoon on “Big Four” broadcast networks, rather than cable, thus presenting better apples-to-apples comparisons. Noteworthy, too, was the overall viewership for volleyball was 75% of that of NASCAR, which has a loyal audience that skews into the 50+ “geezer” demo. The surge in interest in F1 (wildly popular worldwide) in America has been considered a huge success story, particularly with the treasured younger set, yet women’s volleyball vastly outperformed it in the demo and in total eyeballs.
As for comparing ratings from a broadcast platform that can be accessed by America’s 123 million TV households to cable stations with smaller reaches, yes, that is apples-to-oranges. But volleyball’s performance on Fox did illustrate where the sport might stand on the television pecking order. Consider, too, that the Big 12 match between Oklahoma and Iowa State on Sunday afternoon, airing on the flagship ESPN channel, checked in with 206,000 viewers and a .07 18-49 rating, in the ballpark with the international women’s soccer game and the NBA game.
A last apples-to-oranges comparison: Women’s volleyball on Sunday had 20.4% of the viewers of the World Series game (8.126 million) aired Monday night on Fox. Nothing else might illustrate how dramatically viewing tastes have changed in the 21st Century. I fall solidly in the “geezer demo,” and never in my lifetime did I believe I would see a time when volleyball would even be five percent as popular as the World Series, the annual showcase of America’s Pastime. But there it is.
So what else do we know about the oft-referenced 1.659 million number? It obliterated the previous record for a women’s college volleyball telecast by 471,000 viewers. The mark had been held by the 2021 NCAA title match between Nebraska and Wisconsin on cable ESPN2, which lured 1.188 million and an 18-49 rating of .33. It also more than doubled the record for a regular-season women’s volleyball telecast of 612,000 set on Oct. 21 when Wisconsin and Nebraska battled on Big Ten Network.
Now comes the tricky “what we don’t know“ part about the numbers from Sunday on Fox.
The lofty Nielsens were blended totals derived from two Big Ten matches, Ohio State-Michigan and Minnesota-Wisconsin, that aired at different times, in different markets and never overlapped.
It’s similar to Nielsen’s standard practice of reporting a single total for multiple “regional” NFL games aired by one channel during the same time slot. In the case of Sunday, the early afternoon NFL games broadcast on Fox had a viewership of 19.977 and an 18-49 rating of 4.97, which no doubt greased the skids for volleyball with casuals, precisely what the TV executives had hoped would transpire.
So we can’t definitely say how many watched the match between Ohio State and Michigan that started at 2 p.m. Eastern and was shown in markets that included New York (the nation’s largest with 7.7 TV households), Atlanta (seventh-largest) and Boston (10th).
Nor does the blended figure tell us what the viewership was for the match between Minnesota and Wisconsin (ranked No. 2 in the VolleyballMag.com Super 16 Media Poll) that hit the airwaves around 4:50 p.m. Eastern and was seen in most of the country, although the Fox affiliate in Los Angeles (the No. 2 market with 5.5 million TV homes) opted to put it on a secondary digital channel. What figures to have played a significant role in boosting the viewership for Minnesota-Wisconsin was that it followed the NFL game between the Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings in their home markets.
Furthermore, a breakdown of who watched what might never be forthcoming, even from Fox Sports, whose PR department distributed a post on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter that trumpeted the total number as “the most viewed regular-season women’s college volleyball telecast in history,” referencing both Big Ten matches.
Now it’s time to look forward. Coming up on Black Friday is the rematch between Nebraska and Wisconsin on Big Ten Network. Could that showdown exceed the 612,000 that watched the first one? Why not?
Considerable momentum has been built for the NCAA semifinals and final, to be held on December 14 and December 17 at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida. The semifinal matches on Thursday will be shown on cable ESPN, but the title tussle has been moved to Sunday afternoon and will be broadcast on an over-the-air channel, ABC, for the first time.
A viewership of 2 million had been tossed around, but given the success of the Fox telecast, an expectation of an audience approaching 3 million might not be considered unreasonable. When the NCAA women’s basketball final moved off of cable to ABC for the first time this spring, it lured 9.9 million viewers.
Last but not least, let’s peer into the crystal ball. Fox will lose WWE’s “Smackdown,” a consistent ratings winner, from its Friday-night lineup in October of 2024 when the wrestling program jumps to cable USA Network. Why couldn’t Big Ten women’s volleyball fill that two-hour, prime-time void? It’s pure conjecture at this juncture, but a consistent over-the-air presence would take volleyball to a whole new level.
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