USFL hits viewer high with Derby lead-in

A direct lead-in from the Kentucky Derby gave the USFL spring football’s largest audience in more than a year.

Saturday’s Memphis-Michigan USFL regular season game averaged a 1.1 rating and 2.06 million viewers on NBC, the largest audience spring football audience of any kind since the opening weekend of the USFL last year and the 11th-largest dating back to the launch of the Alliance of American Football in 2019. Of those 11 games, it is only the fourth that did not take place in the inaugural week of play.

The previous high for a spring football game this year was 1.57 million for a St. Louis-San Antonio XFL game on the opening weekend of that league’s relaunch.

As previously mentioned, the game aired immediately following the Kentucky Derby — a cushy timeslot NBC once devoted to the NHL (and much further back, the NBA). The last time NBC used the Derby as a lead-in to another live sporting event was 2020, when the race aired over Labor Day weekend and led into a Stanley Cup playoff Game 7 that averaged around three million.

Excluding that anomalous circumstance, the last time NBC carried a live sporting event following the Derby was 2019 — when Blue Jackets-Bruins Game 5 averaged 4.7 million. As goes without saying, nobody would expect a regular season spring football game to measure up to a “Big Four” playoff contest.

NBC did carry a USFL game following the lower-rated Preakness Stakes last year, scoring 1.2 million for Michigan-Birmingham.

No other USFL game this season has cracked the one million viewer mark, much less two million. NBC’s New Orleans-New Jersey game on Sunday averaged a 0.51 and 828,000, followed by Birmingham-Pittsburgh on FS1 at a 0.32 and 545,000. FOX brought up the rear in week four with a 0.30 and 521,000 for Houston-Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon.

Week four was the first of the season in which the USFL did not have to compete with the XFL, which had a bye week leading into its championship game this Saturday.

(Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 5.9)