PBR beats Yankees playoff audience with help from NFL lead-in

Professional Bull Riders had its most-watched event on record with a little help from its gridiron friends.

Sunday’s PBR Teams event on CBS notched the most-watched audience in the history of PBR’s run on the network, averaging 2.71 million viewers. Notably, the event drew more viewers than Game 2 of the New York Yankees-Toronto Blue Jays ALDS game on FS1, which captured just 2.18 million viewers in a similar afternoon window.

PBR also touted some other live sporting events it beat out over the weekend, including Game 1 of the Chicago Cubs-Milwaukee Brewers NLDS Saturday afternoon on TBS (2.17 million viewers), a Colorado-TCU game Saturday night on Fox (2.17 million viewers), and a Boise State-Notre Dame game Saturday afternoon on NBC (2.02 million viewers).

Of course, there is a pretty massive caveat to all of this. PBR had the benefit of leading directly out of CBS’s NFL singleheader window in most markets. That audience happened to be CBS’s largest Week 5 singleheader audience since 1998, averaging 19.58 million viewers. So to look at it from the glass half empty perspective, PBR lost nearly 17 million viewers from its NFL lead-in.

Credit where credit is due, strategic scheduling is part of the game. It’s why the most-watched regular season college basketball game of the year is now typically the game scheduled immediately following the early-afternoon NFL Thanksgiving Day game. Lead-ins and lead-outs matter in the world of linear television viewing. And taking advantage of a singleheader weekend to boost another live sports property is a smart call from CBS.

So, yes. PBR did technically beat out a Yankees playoff game on Sunday. But that doesn’t really tell this full story.