Baylor-Gonzaga Obliterates LeBron-Led NBA Finals in Ratings

Baylor's NCAA Championship win over Gonzaga on Monday drew 16.9 million viewers on CBS. A solid number in 2021, but a great number when compared to the most recent NBA Finals, which averaged nearly 10 million fewer viewers at just 7.4 million, a damning all-time low.

For comparison, here are the ratings from 2016-2019 (NCAA did not have a tournament in 2020):

2019: NCAA Championship (Virginia-Texas Tech), CBS, 19.6 million; NBA Finals (Warriors-Raptors), ABC, 15.1 million.

2018: NCAA Championship (Villanova-Michigan), Turner, 16 million; NBA Finals (Warriors-Cavs), ABC, 17.6 million.

2017: NCAA Championship (UNC-Gonzaga), CBS, 23 million; NBA Finals (Warriors-Cavs), ABC, 20.4 million.

2016: NCAA Championship (Villanova-UNC), Turner, 17.8 million; NBA Finals (Warriors-Cavs), ABC, 20.3 million.

As the data shows, a single NCAA Men's Championship game, when on broadcast TV, tends to outpace the NBA Finals average -- however, a 16.9 million to 7.4 million difference is staggering.

For the NCAA Championship, dropping from 19.6 million to 16.9 million in two-years' time is a modest decline. That's expected and far from alarming. Baylor-Gonzaga ran into cord-cutting, a pandemic, and a younger generation who follows content via social media. Same with the NFL, which dropped around 7% in 2020.

But other there's a trend, a telling trend, in overall TV viewership. While almost all TV programs are down right now for the aforementioned reasons, it's only the woke/everything is racist/Donald Trump is Hitler programming that has suffered an embarrassing collapse.

The NBA told half of its audience to go away, so it did. The LeBron James-led Finals were down more than 50%. Similarly, the 2021 Grammys gave half the country the middle finger and lost half of its audience too. The Golden Globes, ESPYs, ESPN Radio, and Jimmy Fallon also lost viewers at unprecedented rates because of their far-Left turns.

Americans love to consume politics, but they hate when politics have been aggressively mixed into content like sports, which have been historically consumed as an escape. A recent study found that nearly half of America changed its sports viewing habits once woke political and social messaging spread across the leagues.

Baylor-Gonzaga kept the wokeness down and kept its audience. The NBA has reduced its wokeness level, removing Black Lives Matter from the courts, transitioning from Joy Reid-Left back to Rachel Maddow-Left. That shift and the return of normal scheduling should improve the Finals numbers some this season. They'll still be far from previous years though.

The NBA's stance during the riots and police shootings last summer, some anti-Semitic comments from players, questionable punishments leveled out by the league, and the activism of LeBron James have revealed so much about the NBA's agenda and cozy relationship with China that many viewers will never return. The message was sent and received. Perhaps, moving forward, those who still like basketball but can't stomach the NBA will turn to college basketball?