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It Seems Everyone Is Watching Sports These Days

Leagues and networks have seen significant increases in ratings across the board.
Jimmy Traina|
St. John's guard Dylan Darling gave us one of the tournament’s best moments with a game-winning shot against Kansas.
St. John's guard Dylan Darling gave us one of the tournament’s best moments with a game-winning shot against Kansas. | Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

1. On Sept. 1 of last year, Nielsen changed the way it measured viewership numbers for all of television.

I’m not going to bore you with details, but the new method called “Big Data + Panel” has generated viewership increases for almost every sport and sporting event.

Here’s a sampling of how sports has benefitted from the change in measurement. (I’m leaving out the NFL because their ratings are always insane.)

• Miami-Indiana college football championship: 30.1 million viewers, up 36%

• U.S.-Venezuela WBC final: 10.78 million viewers

• NCAA selection show on CBS: 6:4 million viewers, up 12%

• CBS men’s college basketball regular season: up 10%

• Fox men’s college basketball regular season: up 38%

• ESPN men’s college basketball: up 25%

• ESPN women’s college basketball: up 19%

• NHL games across ESPN network: up 26%

• NBA games across ABC, ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon: up 13%

• NCAA men’s tournament: most watched opening two rounds ever with 10.1 million viewers, up 7% over last year.

On Sunday, 19.7 million people combined watched the early window, which featured St. John’s-Kansas, Iowa-Florida and Tennessee-Virginia.

CBS and TBS are poised to have monstrous viewership numbers for Friday’s Sweet 16 thanks to great matchups and college basketball stalwarts (Duke, Michigan, Michigan State, UConn) in action.

The two networks couldn’t ask for a much better schedule than this:

St. John’s-Duke, 7:10 pm., CBS
Alabama-Michigan, 7:35 p.m., TBS
Michigan State-UConn, 9:45 p.m., CBS
Tennessee-Virginia, 10:10 p.m., TBS

Now, the question becomes, can Major League Baseball, which ridiculously begins its season tonight on Netflix, capitalize on the new Nielsen measuring system for a regular-season bump? The sport certainly benefitted last year in the postseason when the World Series averaged 16.1 million viewers and Game 7 pulled in 26 million viewers.

2. Here is one of the great annual segments in sports television: Scott Van Pelt and Stanford Steve trying to guess if a title is a real or fake TruTV show.

3. And what I want more than anything is for a game to end on an overturned call. I don’t want a walk-off ABS challenge. I need a walk-off ABS challenge.

4. Make sure you get this wager in before the Orioles play at 8 p.m. Thursday.

5. What a tremendous quote from new Providence basketball coach Bryan Hodgson at his introductory press conference on Tuesday.

6. We dropped a bonus episode of SI Media With Jimmy Traina on Tuesday. The enormously popular Mets broadcast booth of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling joined me for an interview.

Some of the topics discussed include their philosophy on using analytics during game, being critical of the Mets and the worst part of the job for local announcers.

In addition, Hernandez reveals that he still makes $5,000 a year from Seinfeld residuals while sharing the story of a recent encounter with Jerry Seinfeld.

You can listen to the SI Media With Jimmy Traina podcast below or on Apple and Spotify.

You can also watch SI Media With Jimmy Traina on YouTube.

7. RANDOM VIDEO OF THE DAY: Since my podcast got a nice mention from Carson Daly on the Today Show Wednesday morning thanks to Keith Hernandez’s residual reveal, I figured we’d throw it back to some classic TRL. If you’re of a certain age, you will always remember this trainwreck appearance by Mariah Carey.

Be sure to catch up on past editions of Traina Thoughts and check out the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast hosted by Jimmy Traina on Apple, Spotify or Google. You can also follow Jimmy on X and Instagram.

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Jimmy Traina
JIMMY TRAINA

Jimmy Traina is a staff writer and podcast host for Sports Illustrated. A 20-year veteran in the industry, he’s been covering the sports media landscape for seven years and writes a daily column, Traina Thoughts. Traina has hosted the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast since 2018, a show known for interviews with some of the most important and powerful people in sports media. He also was the creator and writer of SI’s Hot Clicks feature from 2007 to '13.

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