The NCAA News - News and Features

April 13, 1998

Men's basketball tournament attracts 154 million viewers

Viewership for all games up two percent; championship game attracts 17.8 rating

If it seemed like almost everybody was watching the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, that's because almost everybody was.

After the final horn sounded March 30 in the University of Kentucky's victory over the University of Utah for the national championship, a total of 154 million nonduplicated viewers had watched at least six minutes of tournament action.

Mike Aresco, CBS vice-president for programming, said the numbers are huge and reveal the true popularity of the event more than ratings alone do.

Not that the ratings contained bad news. The rating for the entire tournament was 7.3 (17 share), which was an increase of two percent over 1997. That was achieved even though the rating for the championship game, 17.8, was a point lower than in 1997.

Analysts attributed the drop in ratings for the championship game mostly to the involvement of Utah, which was appearing in its first Final Four in more than 30 years and which comes from a lightly populated region. The decline does not reflect on Utah's appeal; however, viewership among casual fans can be affected by the involvement of a less familiar team.

On the other hand, there was the Valparaiso effect.

The Crusaders captured the nation's imagination by surging to the regional semifinals with a pair of down-to-the-wire wins. Led by Valparaiso's "David vs. Goliath" appeal, ratings for the regionals soared.

Ironically, the leap in viewership for the regionals came after a slow start in the early rounds that resulted at least partly from the luck of the draw.

"Geographically, the country wasn't covered as well as usual," Aresco said. "The committee did a good job on the matchups, but a number of the first-round games had regional interest, like Iona-Syracuse. Also, the Atlanta area did not have a team in the tournament."

But the tournament gained momentum as upsets and close games abounded, and the ratings in the regional round soared. Ratings for the regional semifinals, when Valparaiso played the University of Rhode Island, were up 22 percent over the same time period in 1997.

The South regional final between Kentucky and Duke University drew a huge rating of 11.5, the first double-digit rating for a non-Final Four matchup since 1993. It was up 28 percent over the same time period a year ago, the largest such jump in two years.

To illustrate how the tournament gained momentum, ratings for four of the first five days of tournament telecasts were down compared to 1997, but four of the last five were up.

Although the rating for the championship game was down slightly, the rating for the Final Four jumped by four percent compared to 1997.