Duke-Virginia, North Carolina-Louisville, Clippers-Spurs lead cable sports nets for Saturday January 31, 2015

College hoops ruled the cable sports ratings on Saturday and Duke’s victory over Virginia that evening led all of the cable sports networks with an average of 3.489 million viewers and a 1.1 adults 18-49 rating.  The North Carolina vs Louisville game averaged 2.629 million viewers and a 0.9 adults 18-49 rating.

NBA action at 9p ET on ESPN Saturday with the Los Angeles Clippers at the San Antonio Spurs averaged 1.685 million viewers with a 0.6 adults 18-49 rating.

The afternoon Kansas State vs Kansas game averaged 1.209 million viewers and a 0.4 adults 18-49 rating.

The noon game between Wisconsin and Iowa averaged 1.129 million viewers and a 0.3 adults 18-49 rating.

If we’ve converted time zones from Australia to the US correctly and then read the reports right, the women’s Australian Open final (Sharapova-Serena) averaged 805K in the 3am telecast and then another 699K in an ESPN2 encore at 9am ET.

In Premier League action on NBCSN, Manchester United vs Leicester City averaged 443K and a 0.2 adults 18-49 rating at ~10am ET on Saturday.

Cable Sports TV Ratings for Saturday January 31, 2015:

This is sorted from most-watched to least-watched. Using your browser’s search tool (usually CTRL/CMD+F) might be the faster way to go if you’re looking for something specific.

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Note: viewership of around 100,000 or lower is technically what Nielsen refers to as a “scratch” i.e., not enough Nielsen panelists watched for Nielsen to validate it. There are around 20,000 homes in the Nielsen panel and a bit over 50,000 panelists, where 1 Nielsen panelist watching a whole telecast represents around 5,800 people.  So something averaging a million viewers averaged around 170 people out of the 50K+ panel — small, but still statistically significant. But when there’s a show with 30,000 viewers, that’s only around 5 or 6 Nielsen panelists…