It’s Feast Week, and the blue bloods are drawing big time audiences.
Tuesday’s game between the Kansas Jayhawks and Duke Blue Devils averaged 2 million viewers on ESPN, the largest college basketball audience so far this season. The Jayhawks’ narrow win in Las Vegas beat out both Champions Classic games earlier this month (1.84 million viewers for Duke-Kentucky and 1.41 million viewers for Michigan State-Kansas).
The game peaked at 2.5 million viewers. ESPN now owns nine of the ten most-watched college basketball telecasts of the young season.
Notably, the game beat out the night’s NBA competition. The Phoenix Suns and Los Angeles Lakers averaged 1.4 million viewers Tuesday night over on TNT.
The week of Thanksgiving has long been a strong week for college basketball viewership. Colloquially dubbed Feast Week (at least on ESPN), the days surrounding the holiday typically feature a number of strong early season matchups. Kansas-Duke certainly delivered. The game went down to the wire and saw Jayhawks star Hunter Dickinson get ejected late in the game following an apparent kick to the head of a Duke player.
It seems the Feast Week is delivering in more ways than one.
[ESPN PR]
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.