NCAA Tournament TV Ratings Continue To Show Americans Love Basketball, But Not NBA
Opening Thursday of March Madness averaged a record 9.8 million viewers as the gap between interest in college hoops and the NBA grows.
The TV ratings for the first day of the 2026 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament are out, and they are massive. The numbers provide further proof that Americans love watching basketball. They just don't care about the NBA.
According to Sports Media Watch, Thursday’s coverage averaged a combined 9.8 million viewers across CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV (with the primetime window averaging a whopping 12.5M). Those numbers are up 6% from last year, which drew the largest first-day average audience in the history of the tournament (9.1 million).
Nielsen changed its methodology to include its Big Data + Panel approach and expanded out-of-home measurement in September 2025, and it has mostly boosted live sports. So, the 6% increase doesn't necessarily signal a major increase in viewership, but it does show that viewership isn't declining.
Record 2026 NCAA Tournament opening-day ratings hit 9.8 million viewers, topping NBA playoff and Finals averages and showing March Madness trumps the NBA for American basketball fans.
(Denis Poroy/Imagn Images)
The same can't really be said for the NBA, where the on-court product has been in decline for years. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is trying to combat tanking while star players take nights off in the name of "load management" and the games mostly consist of guys jacking up three pointers, shooting free throws and refusing to play defense. Plus, if you've ever attended an NBA game, you know it's more like you went to a concert and some dudes decided to play basketball.
Oh, and then there's the incessant lectures about "social justice" from some of the richest and most privileged members of American society that generally turn away average Americans.
None of those problems exist in college basketball. There's no "load management," no tanking, no lectures about social justice, players actually play defense, fans care, and the atmosphere is electric virtually every night.
March Madness Drives More TV Viewers Than NBA Playoffs
To illustrate the point, let's compare the first day of the NCAA Tournament with the first round of the NBA playoffs. Now, keep in mind, Nielsen's methodology changed after last year's NBA playoffs, so it's not exactly apples-to-apples. But it will still provide important data points.
The league said the eight games on the opening weekend of the 2025 NBA playoffs averaged 4.4 million viewers. Not bad, but less than half the audience of the NCAA Tournament. And, keep in mind, Silver bragged that these were the best numbers in 25 years.
So, the comparison here is the best opening weekend in modern NBA playoff history vs. what amounted to a relatively normal opening day for the NCAA Tournament (yes, it was a tournament record, but the tournament has been trending up at a steady pace from an average of 8.4M in 2023 to 8.6M in 2024 to 9.1M in 2025 to 9.8M in 2026, so this year was not a wild outlier).
And it gets a lot worse for the NBA. Last year's NBA Finals averaged 10.2 million viewers, which is only slightly better than opening day of the NCAA Tournament. But keep in mind those numbers are boosted by the series going seven games. Games 1–6 averaged just 9.2 million viewers.
What does this all tell us? Americans still love watching basketball.
They just don't love watching the NBA.