NCAA DI Outdoor T&F Championships Viewership Soars In 2024

They see it with their own eyes.

People want collegiate track & field on mainstream TV.

More than 1.7 million people watched the four-day broadcast of the 2024 NCAA DI Outdoor Track & Field Championships. That includes 602,000 people who watched the final day of men’s competition on Friday and 519,000 people who watched the final day of women’s competition on Saturday.

How do those numbers compare to previous years?

The previous high for viewership was in 2022 with 1.2 million.

Two years later, more than 500,000 more people took in the Championships.

This was also the first year in recent memory (maybe ever) that ESPN proper broadcasted more than one day of the NCAA Championships, which certainly helps. That being said, comparing just the first two days that were on ESPN2 in each of the past four years shows that 2024 had 155,000 more viewers than the previous high of 442,000 set in 2021.

Perhaps most notably, Friday’s broadcast was the fifth-most watched sports program of the day, according to SportsMediaWatch.com, sitting behind a colossal WNBA matchup between the Caitlin Clark-led Indiana Fever and Washington Mystics, the West Virginia at North Carolina Super Regional, the French Open, and the PGA Tour’s Memorial Tournament.