What to make of this?

[JIMSOULS]

Championship game TV numbers down from last year despite Villanova's high national ranking. I guess it's not surprising considering it was on opposite the ACC title game between UNC and ND. But lower than UConn-SMU?

Villanova-Xavier TV rating

 

[Piratz]

Ratings have been bad for the BE. How much of it is attributed to Fox' issues, how much the BE brand?

 

[shu09]

Originally posted by Piratz:
Ratings have been bad for the BE. How much of it is attributed to Fox' issues, how much the BE brand?

That has little to do with it, IMO. The huge factor is the Big East game was on FS1 and the other games were on an ESPN network. ESPN dominates the sports landscape and is the first (and sometimes only) channel casual fans look to for live sporting events. Sad but true. FOX has a long, long way to go in order to even get in the same ballpark as ESPN.

 

[SOBO1]

Shu09 is right. I think it has more to do with how powerful ESPN is than it does with lack of interest in the BIG EAST.

The casual fan/guy just flips on ESPN whenever they are home regardless of who is playing (for the most part). Not to mention that every bar, gym, restaurant, etc. in America has ESPN on at all times. I have never seen fox sports on at a bar other than that one place in hoboken this season.

 

[Pirate64]

ESPN is the automatic first option.

 

[its haLL baLL]

One thing I don't understand is that Comcast lists all of their sports channels near each other besides for FS1. Near me, ESPN is channel 849 and other sports networks are somewhere between 848-870, but FS1 is channel 925 (for HD). I'm not 100% certain, but I'm fairly confident that there are unassigned channels in that range.

If I did not know what channel FS1 was, I would rarely come across it just by channel surfing.

This post was edited on 3/18 7:54 AM by its haLL baLL

 

[Pirate6711]

Nobody watches FS1 and the Big East currently has no national appeal.

 

[HALL28]

If you had the marquee matchups of the past UConn-Nova, UConn-Syracuse, Syracuse-Georgetown, Pitino, Huggins, Pitt still in the mix etc, casual fans would make much more of an effort to find FS1 and watch the BET. The BET was always one of my favorite sporting events of the year, but now outside of SHU, I really have no interest in watching more than a few minutes of a non-SHU Big East game. The AAC vs BET rating difference is nothing more than the usual difference between ESPN and FS1 viewership.

College basketball is also trending downward outside of March Madness.

The quality of play/offense keeps dropping year by year.

http://regressing.deadspin.com/this-will-probably-be-the-slowest-college-basketball-se-1665098691

Take away a few big ratings games a year like Duke-UNC and frankly, nobody really cares. It wasn't even appealing to watch the best team in the country go undefeated this year because the SEC is so, so bad.

 

[statenman]

It takes a while for any new network to compete, it took Fox news many years to overtake CNN which many though would be impossible. The ratings are also lower for Pac12 games on fox1, so its not an BE thing its Fox1 thing.