Super NCAA volleyball Sunday produced more outstanding TV ratings
Florida drew a program-record crowd of 10,323 in the O’Connell Center for its match with Wisconsin/Maddie Washburn photo
The Nielsen ratings hit for the NCAA women’s volleyball matches televised on Sunday afternoon by national-cable-TV channels, and they produced unexpected, head-scratching results.
The match with the largest audience on a highly competitive NFL Sunday was Oregon at Marquette on Fox Sports 1. It started at 2 p.m. Eastern, and recorded 325,000 total-average viewers over 96 minutes, according to the overnight Nielsens reported by the @SportsTVRatings site.
Wisconsin at Florida, which signed on at 3:02 p.m. on ESPN, posted an average viewership of 193,000 over 178 minutes.
Stanford at Louisville began at 1 p.m. on ESPN2 and was watched by 123,000 viewers over 155 minutes.
But those numbers in and of themselves only tell part of a larger, more compelling story.
The overriding takeaway is that during a 23-minute window from 3:02 p.m. Eastern to 3:25, when the three volleyball matches overlapped, the combined average viewerships totaled 641,000. The National Football League rules Sunday TV with an iron fist, and holds the “broadcast” trump card in the era of ever-increasing cord-cutting that has eroded cable TV’s subscriber base. The NFL has been the only major TV sports property that seemingly is impervious to changing trends as viewers have shifted away from traditional linear platforms.
So 641,00 for a so-called niche sport is a staggering number against the stiffest competition that can be found on any typical day on TV. Quarter-hour breakdowns of the three volleyball matches would tell the complete story – and it’s likely they would show a total less than the combined averages. Nonetheless, this translates to a lot of the coveted “casuals” choosing to watch women’s college volleyball while NFL games were being played on other channels.
Even the viewership of 325,000 on FS1 had to be an unexpected surprise to the host channel, given that its match not only went against the NFL but was directly competing with other volleyball on its ESPN rivals.
Here’s why:
Oregon won in the minimum three sets, while Wisconsin and Stanford waged stirring comebacks from two sets down to prevail in five, the proverbial reverse sweep. The viewerships ran counterintuitive to the conventional wisdom that contentious matches figure to be more appealing to viewers.
Not only that, but huge crowds gathered at the O’Connell Center in Gainesville, Florida (a Gators program-record 10,323), and the Yum Center in Louisville, Kentucky (9,761), providing sizzling atmospheres for the matches telecast on ESPN, while Marquette’s match on FS1 was played in the Golden Eagles’ far-smaller campus venue before a crowd of 653.
Also, of the three cable sports channels, all of which have “reaches” of roughly 72 million U.S. TV households, Fox Sports 1 had the lowest average hourly viewership in prime time in 2022: ESPN, 1.87 million; ESPN2, 335,000; FS1, 273,000.
Furthermore, leading 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 game seen by 331,000.
Again, conventional wisdom dictates that women’s basketball would translate better to women’s volleyball than drag racing, but just the opposite transpired.
All of which illustrates why predicting TV ratings is far from an exact science.
The kicker is that on Sunday night, a total-average viewership of 181,000 over 181 minutes was logged on Big Ten Network for the four-set slugfest between host Nebraska and Kentucky that included a marathon 71-second point that has received significant play across social media.
BTN can be accessed by only 38% of U.S. TV households, it averaged 126,000 viewers for women’s volleyball matches in 2022, and Kentucky-Nebraska aired opposite of a Sunday Night Football game on NBC that attracted more than 17 million viewers.
Bottom line: These should be highly encouraging numbers for volleyball fans who would want to see more of the sport on linear TV platforms. The viewerships also should serve to build the mainstream audience for the NCAA title match when it is broadcast on over-the-air ABC for the first time in December.
And a note about top-ranked and unbeaten Wisconsin, which has played three road matches this season, all before record crowds: The Badgers played at Arkansas and the Razorbacks drew 4,299 fans, breaking the previous program attendance record of 3,015. Then they played Marquette in Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum and they broke the all-time NCAA indoor record with a crowd of 17,037. And then at Florida on Sunday, Wisconsin and the Gators played before an O’Connell Center volleyball-record crowd of 10,323.
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