NBA playoffs win the weekend, and the XFL-USFL showdown begins: Sports on TV (2024)

It was the clash no one was exactly waiting for, except perhaps a handful of network executives, wealthy famous people, some weirdo media reporters (me), and a diehard cadre of football fans.

The third iteration of the XFL and the second year of the second version of the USFL competed for TV audiences this past weekend for the first time, and the winner was … the NBA.

Allow me to explain.

Eight football games aired on six networks over the weekend, four in each league, with the USFL slate averaging 784,000 viewers and the XFL averaging 592,000.

The Fox-owned USFL won the inaugural head-to-head viewership battle, but in the overall scheme of live sports television, the numbers for both leagues are not exactly the stuff of banner headlines and breathless tweets. They could certainly have been worse, and at times for the XFL this season, have been. They’ve also been much better, as they have been, too.

By contrast, the NBA’s first weekend of playoff games averaged 4.15 million viewers on ABC, ESPN and TNT — the best numbers since 2011, the league said. That the NBA walloped the fledgling football leagues isn’t surprising, at all, since the NBA is a mature major-league TV property. The football leagues are new lower-tier entities with more modest expectations, costs, revenue goals and success metrics, while trying to build fan and corporate affinity, so comparison to a major league is apples-oranges.

Nothing came close on live sports TV last week to Saturday night’s Warriors–Kings Game 1, which averaged 6.25 million viewers on ABC — a game that was not only the first postseason meeting for the geographic NBA rivals but also the first playoff game for Sacramento since 2006.

That storyline led to the Kings’ 126-123 win being the NBA’s biggest opening-day playoff TV audience since at least 2001, per Sports Media Watch.

Such numbers certainly don’t hurt the NBA’s push for up to $75 billion in new long-term media rights deals in a couple of years, from its current $25 billion deal.

In addition to trailing the NBA playoffs, none of this weekend’s pro football games tallied as many viewers as the NCAA women’s gymnastics championship, which averaged 1.01 million viewers at 4 p.m. Saturday on ABC, or a pair of Mexican first-division soccer games that aired live on Saturday on Spanish-language channel Univision with both topping 1 million viewers, per Nielsen data via Showbuzz Daily.

The football games also trailed Sunday’s final round of the PGA Tour’s RBC Heritage on CBS, which averaged 4.15 million viewers (up from 3.67 million last year), the 2.21 million watching the NASCAR NOCO 500 on FS1 on Sunday afternoon, and, ironically, WWE Friday Night Smackdown on Fox that averaged 2.26 million viewers on Fox.

On the same weekend a year ago, the Fox-owned USFL’s Saturday prime-time debut averaged more than 3 million viewers thanks to a simulcast on both Fox and NBC, with a Sunday game on NBC alone getting another 2.1 million watching. That league is named for the mid-1980s USFL that challenged the NFL for talent and spent itself out of business after the 1985 season.

The XFL, which originally played one disastrous spring season in 2001 on NBC (which owned half of it), played half a season as a new league in 2020 on ABC/ESPN before the pandemic shut it down and sent it to bankruptcy when owner Vince McMahon, who financed its relaunch with his WWE stock, sold it for $15 million to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his business partners.

Both leagues and their network partners are trying to shape the narrative around the weekend’s numbers.

The USFL tweeted out a comparison of this weekend’s numbers to last year’s full-season viewership average, which is a bit deceptive since the league’s 2022 Week 1 audience average was 1.56 million viewers — significantly more than this weekend’s 784,000 viewer average.

The league deferred comment to Michael Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ executive vice president of strategy and analytics, who tweeted out the network’s apparent satisfaction with the viewership.

Good enough start to USFL season 2. This comparison is going to be a demonstration of the value of broadcast windows and live sports lead-ins as the season goes on. https://t.co/KD0YOj9QPw

— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) April 18, 2023

A source familiar to the XFL’s thinking, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, said the league and its partners are “comfortable with the results across the board” and in particular the in-game attendance and digital/social media consumption of the league’s content. The person also noted that the XFL remains in start-up mode when it comes to creating fanbases for its teams, which play in their home markets (while the USFL has expanded from a single city in 2022 to four markets this season with two teams in each).

The XFL opened its third iteration in February, a week after the Super Bowl, with an average of 1.3 million viewers its first weekend, but that has since fallen as the curiosity factor has worn off and other sports have competed for eyeballs including men’s and women’s March Madness. Three years ago, XFL 2.0’s unfinished season opened with more than 3 million viewers and tapered off to 1.9 million by the time COVID-19 forced its cancellation midway through the season.

The XFL, which has made on-the-fly schedule tweaks, is now averaging 631,000 viewers for the 2023 season. The USFL last year averaged 715,000 viewers on Fox and NBC platforms (with some exclusively on Peaco*ck+ without those audiences being disclosed by NBC).

So what we can take away from the first head-to-head match-up of these leagues (which was Week 9 of the XFL’s 10-week regular season) is that they probably siphoned viewership from each other to some degree. And, unsurprisingly, they do better on network TV than cable — and the deeper on the cable dial, the worse the audience metrics.

What we may be seeing is viewership for spring football settle roughly into the range it belongs while there are competing leagues using both over-the-air and cable channels to build out fanbases.

Pat Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive turned media consultant, said the USFL gets the early leg up because of its over-the-air distribution versus the XFL being more on pay TV.

“Broadcast TV is in like 10 million to 15 million more homes, and that helps if you have two airings versus just one (XFL was on ABC once),” he said. “Overall, though I’d say they both held up pretty well given the competition. To me, these figures are about what I expected.”

They’ll continue to compete for viewers for a few more weeks as the XFL wraps up its regular season this weekend and is followed by two semifinal playoff games and then the championship on May 13 on ABC. The USFL’s 10-week regular season is followed by a similar playoff format that ends with a title game on July 1 on NBC.

It remains unclear if there is room for two such football leagues on U.S. television. Do these audience numbers justify the expense? Are they bringing in enough commercial revenue, and game-day fan cash, to survive? Or will we eventually see one blink and call it quits? Maybe a merger? Perhaps they both are replaced eventually by an AI-narrated Cornhole-Pickleball hybrid?

Again, without knowing the internal success goals, it’s not possible to do much more than read tea leaves and look for tells amid the carefully crafted PR statements, social media posts and comments by network and league officials.

Disney is paying $100 million to $150 million over five years for the XFL’s broadcast rights, according to Sportico. Fox owns the USFL — and has reportedly sought outside investors — and committed $150 million over three years to launch and finance the league.

Unlike the NFL, the two smaller leagues are each single business entities without individual franchise owners, which keeps down costs as they try to find their footing.

Next weekend will include more direct competition for football viewers, too, with one Saturday and one Sunday game from each league going head-to-head, all on cable. Prior to this past weekend’s games, the XFL shifted kickoff for its Seattle-Vegas game to 7 p.m. ET Sunday on ESPN2, which is two hours earlier than the originally scheduled 9 p.m. start. The change means the game will air directly against the USFL’s Week 2 Michigan-Philadelphia matchup on FS1 and should also mean a better audience on a school and work night because it’ll wrap up before midnight in the Eastern time zone. On Saturday, the XFL’s Orlando-St. Louis game (noon, ESPN) goes up against Houston–New Orleans in the USFL (12:30 p.m., USA).

All of the games will face some level of NBA competition again, too. We’ll have a better sense of how they fare now that some USFL Season 2 curiosity among casual viewers is likely to have worn off.

All viewership data is from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, and other metrics via the TV networks, Nielsen, Sports Media Watch, ShowBuzz Daily, 506Sports.com and the leagues, unless otherwise noted. All times U.S. Eastern.

(Photo of the Pittsburgh-New Orleans USFL game: Vasha Hunt / USA Today)