The nation’s premier annual college basketball extravaganza begins next week, and it’ll be the third set of March Madness tournaments since the pandemic forced total cancellation in 2020.
U.S. television viewership overall was roiled by the COVID-19 situation as live sports and other programming went on hiatus or got radically juggled around the calendar before it began to recover in 2021. But add in the ongoing cord-cutting trend, changing consumer viewing habits, and the confusing rise of streaming services, and things have yet to fundamentally return to pre-pandemic levels — and may never.
So what can we expect viewership-wise for the men’s and women’s NCAA Division-I hoops tournaments?
Most likely, we’ll see the same eyeball trends we’ve seen in recent years, but several factors are pretty universal when it comes to the ebbs and flows of audience numbers: Storylines, superstars playing out of their minds, upsets, blowouts versus thrillers, how far historic powerhouses make it, tipoff times, competing programming, etc.
One significant change to the women’s tournament should help goose its audience numbers: For the first time, the women’s national championship game will live on ABC rather than on cable, meaning it gets exposed to a larger audience via the…
