FOX Sports activities has seen a rise in reside TV rankings due to an unlikely sport that continues to develop in recognition within the US.

A NCAA faculty sport has given the huge TV community astonishing outcomes.

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Girls’s faculty basketball has been a large hit for TV viewers just lately, however there was one other sport that has joined in on being a rankings success.

Two years in the past, Fox Sports activities got here up with the concept to air faculty volleyball in NFL-adjacent home windows.

An instance: A lot of the United States watched Wisconsin and Minnesota battle in faculty volleyball after a Inexperienced Bay Packers–Minnesota Vikings sport whereas others noticed Michigan-Ohio State earlier than an NFL window.

Fox Sports activities obtained 1.7 million viewers because of this, and it is the most-watched regular-season volleyball window in historical past.

In 2024, Fox aired 18 matches throughout their networks, together with 4 video games that concerned large colleges like Texas, Wisconsin, Stanford, and Minnesota.

Fox Sports activities VP Derek Crocker spoke to Entrance Workplace Sports activities and shared how the community has been happy with the rising sport of girls’s volleyball.

“We’ve seen with different properties the place clearly you need to use the energy of the NFL lead-in to essentially expose new viewers to sports activities which might be rising—like girls’s volleyball,” Crocker mentioned.

“Seeing these numbers and the way properly it did actually showcased the ability of what girls’s volleyball might be.

“We have been actually inspired by it.”

FOS famous that volleyball “has the youngest viewers and most feminine viewers of any sport” for Fox.

The Huge Ten Community, which is majority-owned by Fox, garnered 591,000 viewers from a Wisconsin-Nebraska sport final yr.

The community will now air spring volleyball protection for its first time.

Fox is not the one community airing extra volleyball.

NBC Sports activities and ESPN have dabbled within the sports activities style.

Final yr, NBC Sports activities broadcasted 4 Huge Ten girls’s volleyball video games for the primary time, together with three of the NBC broadcast community, and one solely on Peacock.

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ESPN’s platforms aired greater than 2,600 matches within the 2024 season.

In December, ABC received the second-most-watched girls’s faculty volleyball championship of all time, with 1.3 million viewers.

Faculty volleyball has additionally been a reside occasion spectacle, as Nebraska stuffed its soccer stadium with over 92,000 followers in August 2023 for a contest towards Omaha.

“Quite a lot of credit score goes to the coaches and the cultures they’ve created, particularly within the Huge Ten,” Crocker mentioned to the outlet.

It seems that if networks like Fox proceed to showcase volleyball to an enormous viewers, both earlier than or after an NFL sport, the game’s recognition and reside TV rankings trajectory are certain to proceed.

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