National Collegiate Athletic Association |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The NCAA News - News and FeaturesThe NCAA News -- April 12, 1999 Final Fours play to the crowds
Men's rating affected by unusual factors
"This 17.2 is an enormous rating by any standard nowadays," said Mike Aresco, vice-president of programming for CBS Sports. "It's going to be one of the highest sports ratings of the year. It will be one of the higher prime-time ratings of the year. We clearly won the night -- we clobbered everyone else -- and it is an enormously attractive audience with great demographics." Other major events have experienced large dropoffs in television ratings in recent years. The World Series has fallen from 19.5 in 1995 to 14.1 last year, the lowest ever for that event. The 1999 Super Bowl rated 40.2, down 10 percent from the 44.5 percent of 1998. Ratings for the Academy Awards were down 18 percent this year to 28.6. The rating for the men's basketball championship was identical to the 17.2 for the 1999 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl national championship football game. The overall tournament had a rating of 6.8, which was a 7 percent decline compared to 1998. Aresco said it is almost certain that the television performance for the tournament will rebound in 2000 because so many unusual factors aligned to reduce viewership in this year's event. Aresco said the lower than normal ratings likely were the result of an abnormally large number of lopsided games, early elimination of almost all West Coast teams and an international crisis in Kosovo. In several instances, games that looked appealing on paper turned into blowouts, thus reducing appeal for the casual viewer. Aresco provided the following comparison between the 1998 and 1999 event:
Not all rounds of the 1999 tournament experienced significantly lower ratings. For example, both days of the first round rated 4.7, compared to 4.8 last year. However, both the first and second time slots on Saturday's second-round games featured lopsided games that resulted in low viewership. Besides that, Aresco said the second round also wiped out all West Coast teams except for Gonzaga University, crippling ratings from that region for the rest of the tournament. "Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and Seattle all delivered fewer homes in '99," Aresco said. "The championship game alone -- and here's an interesting statistic -- LA delivered 28 percent less. San Francisco was down 13 percent from last year, Sacramento was 20 percent down and Seattle was 28 percent down. So we can see that the championship-game impact was enormous on the West Coast." Kosovo The effect of the Kosovo crisis also was revealed by ratings for news networks. "Over Final Four weekend," Aresco said, "the all-cable news channels -- Fox News Channel, Headline News, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC -- averaged a total 2.1 U.S. rating from the late afternoon through prime time. That was up 133 percent from what they averaged a year ago, which was a .9 U.S. rating. "On championship night itself, from 9 to 11, you had men 18 to 49 and men 25 to 54 ... an increase of 233 percent and 300 percent in those demographical categories watching those cable news channels on Monday night. It doesn't take much to have some impact, and clearly there was some impact." After the Final Four, some observers questioned if the championship game lasted too long into the night. This year's title game ended at about 11:20 Eastern time. However, Aresco said that whatever gains an earlier start might produce in the Eastern time zone would be offset by losses in the West. "In 1996 we started at 8:18 (Eastern time), and the rating for that first hour was much lower," he said. "You lose the West Coast even more if you start early because at that point it's 5:18 out there. People aren't even home." Aresco said that ABC experienced a ratings drop this year when it moved Monday Night Football to an earlier start. The National Football League and ABC announced April 2 that they will return that kickoff to its former time. "The start time still tends to maximize the ratings because it brings in the maximum West Coast rating and you don't lose that much in the East because you're not going past midnight," Aresco said. Other factors Finally, although no championship ever will have a distribution of teams that is ideal for television, this one was missing key elements, especially after the early rounds. For the second year, no team from the population-rich Atlanta area reached the tournament. Only two teams from Texas participated, and both bowed out in the first round. Although the Big Ten Conference was heavily represented, two teams from that conference with major national appeal -- the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, Champaign -- were not in the tournament. Because so many factors contributed to the low figure this year, Aresco is all but certain that next year's numbers will bounce back. However, he said that people need to be realistic about what ratings can be achieved these days, given the changing nature of television. "When you have that big Big Ten team in the championship game like Michigan or Indiana and then if you have a North Carolina or a Kentucky with strong grass-roots support, there's where you're going to get closer to 20," he said. "I don't know if there's a 20 out there, but if there is, that's where you're going to get closer." Attendance Attendance for the tournament was high. As usual, the Final Four was an advance sellout. Regionals at Knoxville, St. Louis and Phoenix sold out, and the East regional at East Rutherford drew 99 percent of capacity. First- and second-round games at Boston, Seattle and Denver also sold out. 1999 percentof capacity A site-by-site review of percent of capacity during the preliminary rounds of the 1999 Division I Men's Basketball Championship:
Percent of capacity
The percent of capacity in the preliminary rounds of the Division I Men's Basketball Championship since 1991:
Men's basketball television ratings1999
First round
A ratings point equals 980,000 households. |
The television rating for the 1999 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship final between the University of Connecticut and Duke University was 17.2 -- low by historical standards but high given the realities of modern television.