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NCAA
Men's Final Sets NEW YORK (AP)--Connecticut's upset Monday of Duke in the national champioship may have shaken the college basketball world, but it didn't stir people to watch. CBS' telecast of Huskies' three-point win posted a 17.2 national rating and a 27 share, the lowest in the 18 years that CBS has televised the event. This year's championship game was down 3 percent from last season's Kentucky-Utah final, which had a 17.8 rating and 28 share, and was the lowest-rated NCAA championship game since the 1972 UCLA-Florida State final, which was played in the afternoon. Think about it this way: More people watched Duke lose by 30 to UNLV in the 1990 NCAA Championship game (20.0 rating) than watched the Blue Devils lose by three to Connecticut (17.2). Overall, the 1999 tournament had a 6.8/15 share, down 7 percent from last year's 7.3/17. The previous worst was a 7.2 in 1997, the year Arizona defeated Kentucky in the title game.
"The games weren't as close as they had been last year," CBS spokeswoman LeslieAnne Wade told The Associated Press. "You're always a little disappointed even when it's a high number because you'd like to see it higher. This is one of our favorite events and this doesn't do anything to alter our affection for it." Only 14 of the 63 games were decided by five points or under, just one went into overtime and 17 were blowouts of 20 points or more. Last year's tournament had 20 games within five points, five in overtime and 11 determined by 20 points or more. "When you have close games through the whole tournament, people start to catch on, make an investment and end up with us on Monday night," Wade said. "I think that hurt us a little bit." Ratings for most of the West Coast cities fell because there were no representatives from the region, unlike last year when both Stanford and Utah made the Final Four. The championship game dropped 28 percent in Los Angeles and 13 percent in San Francisco. For the women's championship game between Purdue and Duke, ESPN set a record with the biggest rating in the network's four-year history of broadcasting the event. The game posted a 4.3 rating, an increase of 16 percent from last year's Tennessee-Louisiana Tech title game that had a 3.7. Overall tournament ratings were also up this year for the women. Games on ESPN rose 24 percent and ESPN2 had a 8 percent increase, compared with last season. The rating is the percentage of TV households in the nation tuned to a program, and each point represents 994,000 homes. The share is the percentage tuned to a program among those televisions on at the time. The Associated Press contributed to this story. Back
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