TV Ratings for NCAA Wrestling Championships
- Thread starter jmadden1998
- Start date
I watched through the ESPN app on a fire stick. Is that included?
Apparently not according to the one tweet. So the numbers could be skewed a bit. Does anyone think the powers that be will make changes? If so, what changes? Emphasis on officials to enforce current stalling rules? Create new rules?
I don't know how many new rules they need. The matches themselves in the championship were great. I don't think the issue is with the product. The only one that would really help is making the replay review more efficient.
They really need to come up with a way to track the different methods streaming now. Way too many people using these methods to not include them.
Do your DD. Nielsen ratings are directly related to he who pays the bill. This method of tracking viewership went out with the Blackberry.
Penn State playing in the NCAA tournament for the first time in over 10 years probably caused >100K of the drop, I'm the only one of my family and friends that watched wrestling over basketball and in prior years most of them were watching the finals.
28% is too big a change to be a rules issue, especially when the rules didn't change from last year. Rules make sense only if it caused 1/4 of last year's viewers to not enjoy those finals.
The likely issues are some combination of measurement, marketing, and the PSU hoops game airing at the same time.
Semifinals was down dramatically as well. So not sure PSU game was a big factor.
I watched on the ESPN+ app on my smartTV. Was able to watch more this year than in the past as we ditched cable/dish and only use streaming services.
I know next to nothing about this stuff, but I have a hard time believing a PSU hoops game made any significant impact on the viewership numbers decreasing by more than 25%. I'd think the sports most well-publicized star/"best story" not being part of the broadcast would have had a bigger impact than PSU vs UT.
I like wrestling. Options exist for me to see damn near every Penn State match/tournament and all the good freestyle stuff. You guys can chase the unicorn of “growing the sport”. As long as I can watch the matches, IDGAF who else does.
For all intent and purpose, PSU had the championship locked up Friday night. And yes, I knew the magic number wasn't down to "0", but the win was inevitable.
For discussion only, I wonder if the landslide win didn't cause some of the drop. Not among PSU fans, mind you, but others.
I wonder too if the Lee loss in the semis had an impact on the number of Iowa fans watching, at least the finals.
For discussion only, I wonder if the landslide win didn't cause some of the drop. Not among PSU fans, mind you, but others.
I wonder too if the Lee loss in the semis had an impact on the number of Iowa fans watching, at least the finals.
I'm kind of surprised by this. If they had said viewership was down for other rounds, I'd almost expect that because of the Matcast broadcast offered on the app. I watched every round there except the finals because you can see every mat at one time.
Move the entire season back a month so wrestling no longer competes with March madness. Give wrestling it's own weekend and a clever name, ADVERTISE IT BETTER, and see what happens.
"The Warriors of Wrestling" "The April Grapple" "Mahem on the Mat"
"The Warriors of Wrestling" "The April Grapple" "Mahem on the Mat"
I did as well. I had the Matcast up on my laptop and used that to track what was happening at any given time, then put the individual mat feed of my choice from the app on my fire stick on my TV. I watched the regular ESPN broadcast for both the semis and finals (except switching to watch PSU consi matches during the semis).
Nothing from before 2012? So wrestling really was invented around 2011.
MatCast was offered on the App last year too...in fact, last year it was free, this year it required an ESPN+ subscription.
Generally agree. All I care about is not having to watch guys stall.
Honestly, the best way to grow or even sustain wrestling is to ensure college football is great because college football helps subsidize every other sport.
Unfortunately, NCAA football is also run by morons (and, worse, SEC homers). For example, college football has BY FAR the most entertaining and exciting regular season of ANY sport in the world. Always has. And it's why the sport makes so much money. The best way to continue that would be an eight team playoff; 4 is too few, anything more than 8 is too many, because, generally, you can have great teams with 2 losses*, but once you get to 3 losses, you're talking teams that don't even remotely deserve a "national title." I don't know that a 12 team playoff, in conjunction with some other recent changes mostly caused by the NFL's damn rookie pay scale, will ruin the sport .... but it will weaken the importance of the best regular season, something that subsidizes all of the rest of college athletics. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The other, which I admit I'm just rambling about, is to reinterpret Title 9 not so much to favor men over women, but to not allow programs - like Oregon, which I still can't believe cut their program - to use it as an excuse to hurt wrestlers. The worst offender was Notre Dame, whose program was funded by a dead oil man's money, but who got the widow to agree to redirect the funding. Then ND blamed Title 9. Oregon, in a really good wrestling state, cut wrestling to fund baseball IIRC.
*For example, 1981 Penn State, which lost to Alabama and Miami, was a ludicrously good team, considered by most math and stats computers to be the best 2-loss team ever and arguably even better than the 1982 national title team
On his blog, which may or may not still exist, Wade Schalles proposed that college wrestling start later - i.e. early January - so the sport's tournament doesn't at all run against basketball. I'm ambivalent about this idea. But I thought I'd mention it.
Maybe Neilsen ratings accounted for Iowa fans crumbling their glasses Friday night causing an obvious estimated drop in viewership?
That's been bandied about for a while now. And it should. Wrestling should not encapsulate Thanksgiving and Winter Break - and it needs to get away from March Madness.
The weekend they wrestle the NCAA championships has widespread tv/streaming access on ESPN. If the tournament is earlier, available basketball games push the sport aside. I imagine ESPN would still stream the championships, but Friday and Saturday night prime time disappears.
As far as condensing the calendar, sure. However, nothing done is in a vacuum. Penn State already wrestles a condensed schedule. I believe at least twice in the past few years they have left a competition date on the table when scheduling. Start the season right after the CFP championship (we don't want to compete with other big events (yes that is tongue-in-cheek)) and finish it up at the end of April. Mid-January to the end of March, 2.5 months to get regular season in. The Big10 regular season runs about 6, maybe 7 weeks. That leaves 3 or 4 weeks to get a couple outside conference competitive dates worked out. With Penn State being the model, fewer dates and much more rest is the growing model. Shrinking the season shrinks the opportunities to see competition.
As far as condensing the calendar, sure. However, nothing done is in a vacuum. Penn State already wrestles a condensed schedule. I believe at least twice in the past few years they have left a competition date on the table when scheduling. Start the season right after the CFP championship (we don't want to compete with other big events (yes that is tongue-in-cheek)) and finish it up at the end of April. Mid-January to the end of March, 2.5 months to get regular season in. The Big10 regular season runs about 6, maybe 7 weeks. That leaves 3 or 4 weeks to get a couple outside conference competitive dates worked out. With Penn State being the model, fewer dates and much more rest is the growing model. Shrinking the season shrinks the opportunities to see competition.
Could somebody add some context and tell me what the viewership numbers for the Womens basketball championships?
ESPN doesnt have any rights to march madness. So ESPN got the rights to wrestling. The ratings might be down but they are higher then other option ESPN has.
I actually think they have talked about starting season in January and eliminating the season being over 2 semesters. Might make sense. No competition with college football (except playoffs) and not knocking heads with March Madness.
Then it’s up against playoff season in the league and the NHL. Bottom line is that it was a huge blowout, team wise, and the best wrestler was not wrestling plus, yes, some of the PSU crowd did not show due to BB. Wrestling is dominated by one team and one team only who has outscored the second best team by an average of 34 points in the last six championships. Iowa won by 15.5 in 2021. There really isn’t and suspense.
wrestling has its challenges and the media doesn't help. They are so engrained in pushing what they think are big sports, which helps keeping them 'big sports'. Newspapers always talk of baketball and football - sometimes baseball now since late Spring can be empty. I am convinced that if ESPN pushed wrestling similar to womens college basketball that it would do well. Local newspapers have no excuse with the exception of the local coaches and wrestling community not trying to report results, etc.
One of the reasons I like wrestling and a few other sports and am tiring of football is the commercialism and subjectivity of the sport. Now even college fball has it. TV time outs are mini-half times. I don't want to go on, but we've engrained some of these sports in our society and few even want to change. Remember when ESPN use to show all sports and sports center actually had more than 10 minutes of updates?
-edit - boy I sound sour...need a beverage!
One of the reasons I like wrestling and a few other sports and am tiring of football is the commercialism and subjectivity of the sport. Now even college fball has it. TV time outs are mini-half times. I don't want to go on, but we've engrained some of these sports in our society and few even want to change. Remember when ESPN use to show all sports and sports center actually had more than 10 minutes of updates?
-edit - boy I sound sour...need a beverage!
