The Nielsen ratings hit for the NCAA women’s volleyball matches televised on Sunday afternoon by national-cable-TV channels, and they produced unexpected, head-scratching results.
The match with the largest audience on a highly competitive NFL Sunday was Oregon at Marquette on Fox Sports 1. It started at 2 p.m. Eastern, and recorded 325,000 total-average viewers over 96 minutes, according to the overnight Nielsens reported by the @SportsTVRatings site.
Wisconsin at Florida, which signed on at 3:02 p.m. on ESPN, posted an average viewership of 193,000 over 178 minutes.
Stanford at Louisville began at 1 p.m. on ESPN2 and was watched by 123,000 viewers over 155 minutes.
But those numbers in and of themselves only tell part of a larger, more compelling story.
The overriding takeaway is that during a 23-minute window from 3:02 p.m. Eastern to 3:25, when the three volleyball matches overlapped, the combined average viewerships totaled 641,000. The National Football League rules Sunday TV with an iron fist, and holds the “broadcast” trump card in the era of ever-increasing cord-cutting that has eroded cable TV’s subscriber base….
