{"id":706581,"date":"2026-04-09T12:15:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T12:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/706581\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T12:15:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T12:15:19","slug":"tnt-sports-draws-best-ncaa-mens-basketball-championship-since-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/706581\/","title":{"rendered":"TNT Sports draws best NCAA Men\u2019s Basketball Championship since 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">Michigan\u2019s win over UConn on Monday night delivered 18.3 million viewers to TNT\/TBS\/truTV, marking the best NCAA Men\u2019s Basketball Championship game audience since Virginia-Texas Tech drew 19.6 million in 2019. The gain of 1% over Florida-Houston last year is likely attributable to the introduction of full out-of-home measurement and Big Data. The audience is easily the best national title game for TNT Sports, passing the 17.8 million that the three networks got for the company\u2019s first title game back in 2016 (Villanova-North Carolina). Michigan-UConn peaked at 20.4 million viewers on Monday from 11-11:15pm ET. Overall, the 2026 NCAA Men\u2019s Basketball Tournament across TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV was up 7% compared to 2025 and marks the second-best tourney since 1994. The event also set a new mark for content views on official social platforms. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">ESPN finished with an average of 1.3 million viewers for the NCAA Women\u2019s Basketball Tournament across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, marking the second-best tourney average on record (behind only 2024, when Iowa and Caitlin Clark made a run to the final). This year\u2019s tournament had 21 games top 1 million viewers, passing last year\u2019s total. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michigan\u2019s win over UConn on Monday night delivered 18.3 million viewers to TNT\/TBS\/truTV, marking the best NCAA Men\u2019s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[7,217,231,772,1544,1107],"class_list":{"0":"post-706581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-college-basketball","10":"tag-ncaa","11":"tag-ncaa-basketball","12":"tag-ncaab","13":"tag-tnt-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}