Fox’s debut postseason college hoops tournament, the College Basketball Crown, delivered some ho-hum viewership figures.
Sunday’s College Basketball Crown title game, which aired at 5 p.m. ET on Fox, shortly after the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament wrapped up on ABC, drew 822,000 viewers for Nebraska’s win over UCF. The audience was 62% bigger than the NIT championship game Thursday night on ESPN (508,000 viewers).
As one would expect, the Crown championship was the most-watched game of the first-year competition. The semifinals, which were contested Saturday afternoon, drew an average of 716,000 viewers on Fox, per data from Sports Business Journal.
Across the entire competition, College Basketball Crown games averaged 260,000 viewers on Fox and FS1. That beat the average for this year’s NIT on ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNU (212,000 viewers), though would have fallen short of the NIT audience with ESPNU games excluded.
Predictably, the Crown semifinals and championship carried viewership for the tournament. Those three games all received favorable television windows; weekend afternoons on a major broadcast network. First round and quarterfinal games on FS1 during the week attracted much more modest audience figures.
If Fox’s goal was incremental viewership gains, then the College Basketball Crown was a success. In the absence of any postseason college basketball coverage, something is better than nothing. Whether the Crown will have longevity, as Fox play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson suggests, will be determined in the years to come.
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.