What a strange time this is in the evolving world of Ƶ television.
The season opener for the Cardinals, the foundation of sports in the city for more than a century, was beaten in ratings by not only the local spring football team but also by a women’s basketball game.
The Battlehawks, a United Football League team that now has played a grand total of 16 games spread over parts of three seasons in two leagues, had their season opener Saturday afternoon on the road against Michigan. The telecast of that game, on KTVI (Channel 2), was seen in 4.5% of the market according to viewership-tracking company Nielsen. Bally Sports Midwest’s rating for its airing of the Cards’ opener, last Thursday in Los Angeles, was 4.2.
The Caitlin Clark viewership freight train that has been smashing national viewership records for months also rolled over the Redbirds — and everything else sports-wise in the market in the last week. Her Iowa basketball team beat Louisiana State on Monday night in a rematch of last year’s NCAA Tournament title game, this time in a regional final, and ESPN’s telecast of that contest generated a 5.9 rating in Ƶ. Nationally, it was the most-watched women’s college basketball game ever (12.3 million viewers) and drew the biggest ESPN audience ever for a college basketball game regardless of gender. Next up for the Hawkeyes is a national semifinal contest against Connecticut, at approximately 8:30 p.m. Friday on ESPN.
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UFL by the numbers
Market | Network | Rating |
---|---|---|
Ƶ | Fox | 4.5 |
Birmingham | Fox | 2.6 |
Detroit | Fox | 2.2 |
Dallas | Fox | 0.8 |
All those contests outpaced the Blues, who drew a 1.8 rating for their game Saturday on BSM Extra. That’s Bally Sports Midwest’s spillover channel on which it places games when it shows multiple events simultaneously.
Meanwhile, there were several factors that likely hurt the opening day baseball rating. Not only were the Cardinals coming off their worst season in decades, but they also quickly fell behind last Thursday and trailed 5-0 after three innings en route to a 7-1 loss. The game also was quick (two hours, 23 minutes) and ended about 5:30 p.m. in Ƶ, before many people had arrived home from work. And in the bigger picture, BSM’s distribution shortcomings leave its telecasts off numerous programming providers that showed the Battlehawks and Hawkeyes.
It will be interesting to see how Bally Sports Midwest does this Thursday for the Cards’ home opener, traditionally one of the highest-rated games of the season.
On the Battlehawks front, some fans were agitated because they missed the start of the team’s opener. Fox showed the Birmingham-Arlington UFL contest as the lead-in, which ran long and overlapped with the beginning of the Battlehawks-Panthers matchup. Instead of moving viewers in Ƶ and Detroit to the local teams’ contest, Fox stuck with the first contest.
That’s in stark contrast to the policy for the NFL, which in such cases requires network affiliates in the cities of its teams to show the local club’s games in their entirety. The result is that occasionally the earlier game is bumped while in progress, but that kind of arrangement is not in place for UFL contests.
So viewers of Fox local outlet KTVI missed nearly the first six minutes of play in the B-Hawks’ matchup, although it was shown on the relatively obscure FS2 cable channel and on Fox Sports’ streaming outlets.