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Star Power Boosts NCAA Tournament Ratings

Duke forward Zion Williamson walks off the court after an NCAA men's East Regional final college basketball game against Michigan State, Sunday, March 31, 2019, in Washington. Michigan State won 68-67. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

The weekend March Madness games may have been disappointing for fans of Tobacco Road's college basketball teams. But for the networks it was a ratings bonanza.

Michigan State's thrilling NCAA Tournament victory over Duke drew a 10.5 percent television rating. That's the highest for a late Sunday regional final in over a decade.

Interest in the Blue Devils has been propelled this year by freshman sensation Zion Williamson. He's now expected to go pro and is a likely number one NBA draft pick.

Neilsen ratings for the entire tournament are up 8 percent over last year, when brackets across the country were upended by a slew of major upsets.

Ratings represent the percentage of U.S. television households tuned into a program.

The Final Four begins Saturday. With Duke's loss to Michigan State and North Carolina's loss to Auburn, Virginia is the ACC's last remaining team.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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