One of the dirtiest dirty little secrets about sports is that casual fans are responsible for the bulk of the impressions that make up a high-rated broadcast, which means that pretty much every massive audience is composed primarily of noisy dilettantes who are motivated by: a) FOMO and b) a weirdly ill-defined sense of antipathy. Half of the people who tune in to the Super Bowl every year are there for the commercials and Beyoncé and the free hors d’oeuvres, and maybe three out of every five college basketball viewers are plopped down in front of the set on the first Monday in April because they hate Duke.
Hating some guys is as American as apple pie and losing a couple of important fingers on Independence Day, and while harboring animus for a group of talented strangers is admittedly not one of our most admirable qualities, there’s no sense in running from who we really are. As a nation, we hate Duke mostly because it feels good, but also because football season is over and what’s the point of stoking the fires of our collective animosity toward, say, the Dallas Cowboys when we’re still six months away from catching that first glimpse of Jerry Jones fuming inside the owner’s terrarium?
For CBS, the upside of all the free-floating rancor that Duke excites is that the No. 1 seed in the East is the favorite to win the title at +280 odds. Much like the NFL franchise in North Texas, Duke has been a reliable mover of the ratings needle for decades—aside from the big numbers the program scared up in the ‘90s, the Blue Devils’ 68-63 victory over Wisconsin in the 2015 championship tilt remains the most-watched college basketball game of the 21st century—and the further they advance, the bigger the TV numbers will grow. From a ratings perspective, the only mark against this year’s squad is that they are untainted (or, depending on how you look at it, diluted) by any real signs of villainy.
If it’s admittedly bad form to throw the word “hate” around within the context of an 18-year-old who also happens to be the projected No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, Cooper Flagg has made it next to impossible to get all that riled up about this year’s model of Duke basketball. Although no Blue Devil will ever be as universally admired and just-plain-liked as Grant Hill, Flagg is firmly positioned alongside Hill on the sunny side of the Durham Blood-Boiling Continuum. While Grayson Allen was created in a lab by bored scientists who wanted to see if they could invent a more irksome Christian Laettner, Flagg is the rare Dukie who’s [almost] easy to root for.
Of course, we barely know the kid. Unlike Allen and Laettner, who both won titles while hanging around campus for four seemingly endless years, Flagg is still a novelty item. Familiarity may still go about its age-old business of breeding contempt, but this era of college hoops rarely allows for the emotional alchemy of yesteryear to kick in with any force. Today’s stars don’t stick around long enough to develop into supervillains; to crib from Long Island’s Jerome Seinfeld, when you root against Duke, you’re pretty much just giving the thumbs down to some laundry.
Flagg’s been cleared to play in Friday afternoon’s opener against Mount St. Mary’s, which will tip off as 32.5-point dogs. (The Mountaineers on Wednesday beat American 83-72 in the First Four to earn their showdown with Duke, which is about to embark on its 47th March Madness appearance.) While Flagg was nursing the rolled ankle that sidelined him for much of the ACC tournament, the 31-3 Blue Devils managed to win the conference title in his absence. At the risk of counting unhatched chickens, four wins gets Duke into the Final Four. The last time the program advanced to the semis was in 2022, when an unprecedented spring showdown with North Carolina (and what turned out to be Mike Krzyzewski’s last game) scared up a seismic 18.5 million viewers.
For CBS, the unstated goal is to host Duke in the championship game on April 7. While notable alum Sean McManus (’77) is no longer at the helm of the CBS Sports empire, Michigan grad David Berson wouldn’t say no to a Blue Devils-Wolverines final. Nor would CBS’ advertisers; per Nielsen, the 1992 Duke-Michigan bout remains the second most-watched college basketball game on the books behind only the Bird-Magic showcase in 1979, averaging 34.3 million viewers. Indeed, Michigan’s share of top 20 games is second only to Duke’s, as the maize-and-blue have appeared in four of the most-watched broadcasts of all time to Duke’s half-dozen.
If cord-cutting and the overall atomization of video consumption has put an audience of nearly 35 million viewers more or less out of reach, it’s worth noting what CBS managed with its Wisconsin-Duke broadcast in 2015. In what still stands as the most-watched college game since 1997, Duke’s most recent championship averaged 28.3 million viewers at a time when streaming services had yet to make younger consumers all but allergic to linear TV. A present-day rematch of Duke’s demolition of the Fab Five probably doesn’t do ’92-grade numbers, but the advertisers who’ll shell out $2.5 million for every 30-second spot that airs during the final will be ecstatic.
And even if Flagg & Co. fail to make the trip to San Antonio, you can’t swing a Wildcat by the tail this year without hitting a blue blood. Kentucky’s a bit of a long shot (30-1) to play Alamo-adjacent basketball in a few weeks, but it always draws a crowd, and Duke’s archnemeses North Carolina is already making the nay-sayers and whingers look a bit dim after its 95-68 demolition of San Diego State in the First Four. (“They only got in because of money.” Well, duh. Dust yourself off after your long journey in the back of the turnip truck and welcome to big-time sports. Money’s a thing.)
Speaking of money, while the people responsible for the death of the gloriously dyspeptic Big East v. 1.0 should never enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep, the presence of St. John’s as the No. 2 seed in the West is a nice callback the good old days when prematurely wizened grumpuses like John Thompson, Rollie Massimino and Jim Boeheim scowled their way to massive ratings at a time when the internet was the exclusive refuge of scientists and cellphones were the size of cinder blocks. A deep run by Rick Pitino’s zillionaire-enhanced Red Storm unlocks the cheat code for a home market that features 7.49 million TV households, which accounts for 6% of the entire national base.
A New York team is always good for ratings, but given that nearly half (48%) of all U.S. TV homes are situated within the Eastern time zone, just about any high-profile school Back East can help move the needle. St. John’s Final Four odds are listed at 12-1, and the longer it can keep dancing, the higher the TV numbers will pile up.
However things shake out over the next few weeks, the men’s championship game is all but guaranteed to step up again after playing second fiddle to the women’s tilt a year ago. Staging the final on big-reach CBS will go a long way toward recapturing the share that was lost care of the 2024 UConn-Purdue closer, which was televised by TNT Sports’ shrinking cable networks. Broadcast’s reach advantage is north of 20 million homes; toss a rage-bait draw like the Blue Devils into the mix and last year’s results are going to take on the unmistakable contours of a fluke.
If you’re CBS, all you need is hate.
