I had a couple readers ask my about the April Fools Facebook prank that NDSU pulled a couple of years ago, here’s what it said about NDSU hosting Duke:
There’s no joke about tonight’s game. And there isn’t joking about the amount of people that will be watching. Football fans will not want to hear this, but this will be the most watched NDSU sporting event they’ve ever had. (I’m not counting College Gameday or the NFL Draft, those are not events or games)
Basketball has already had some highly rated broadcasts:
- 2014 game with Oklahoma: 1.365 million people streamed the game
- 2015 game with Gonzaga: 2.1 million watched on TNT
- 2019 First Four game with NC Central: 1.13 million watched on TruTV
To compare with what football has done:
- 2016 quarterfinal with SDSU: 1.98 million watched on ESPN
- 2018 quarterfinal with Colgate: 1.8 million watched on ESPN
- 2018 FCS Championship with James Madison: 1.5 million watched on ESPN2
The highest rated FBS game was the Iowa game at 968 thousand on ESPN2. Tonight will be much more than that, I expect a number around three million, simply because of the time of the game (7 Eastern) and channel (CBS). Network televison always draws more viewers because believe it or not there are many people that don’t have cable.
