ESPN on Saturday night drew a 2.6 overnight rating for North Carolina's win over Duke, marking the best figure for any college basketball game this season to date on any network and the best in the Carolina-Duke rivalry since ‘12. The comparable second matchup of the regular season between the two schools drew a 2.1 overnight last year, but that game had a 6:30pm ET start. Saturday night’s game also marks the fourth-best UNC-Duke overnight on record for ESPN dating back to ’03 (26 games). The game peaked at a 3.3 overnight as the game was winding down from 10:15-10:30pm. Raleigh-Durham led all markets with a 19.5 local rating, followed by ACC markets Greensboro-Winston-Salem (15.1), Charlotte (10.7), Louisville (7.8) and Greenville-Spartanburg (7.6). Saturday’s game also performed well on the WatchESPN platform. Around 314,000 viewers streamed 14.1 million minutes of the game, marking ESPN’s best figure on record for a weekend college hoops game. The two UNC-Duke games this season now account for ESPN’s two most-streamed college hoops games on record. Washington State-UCLA also benefited from the UNC-Duke lead-in, as ESPN drew a 1.2 overnight for the game in the 10:15pm window, marking a tie for the net’s best Pac-12 game of the season (Austin Karp, Assistant Managing Editor).
YOU MUST BE TRIPPIN': In Tampa, Tom Jones writes ESPN's Jay Bilas "bent over backward to not have an opinion" while watching replays of Duke G Grayson Allen elbowing North Carolina G Brandon Robinson -- a play for which Allen received a technical foul. Bilas, who played at and later coached at Duke, is "pretty objective" with his alma mater, and Bilas likely "didn't want to call a player dirty" if he was not 100% sure. However, that play "seemed pretty obvious." Meanwhile, Jones wonders why analyst Dick Vitale "wasn't on this game" alongside play-by-play announcer Dan Shulman (TAMPA BAY TIMES, 3/6).
