UNC Baseball Leads ESPN To Most-Watched NCAA Regional Weekend Ever

The opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament was one for the ages. It included six walk-offs on opening day, a record since the current format was implemented in 1999. Two of those walk-offs happened at the same site, for the first time ever, in Chapel Hill at Boshamer Stadium: LSU hit a solo walk-off home run versus Wofford, and North Carolina advanced over Long Island with a walk-off grand slam.

Those two programs met three times in the Chapel Hill regional, each time delivering a phenomenal performance and recording record viewership numbers for the NCAA Baseball Tournament regional round. The crowd in Chapel Hill was one of the hottest tickets across the country, as only standing-room-only tickets were available for each contest between the host Tar Heels and defending national champions.

Game Four in the winner's bracket game on Saturday night was the second-most watched game of all-time for an NCAA Baseball regional game, and at the time, set the record with 756,000 viewers. Two nights later, in the winner-take-all game seven to advance to the Super Regionals, the Tigers and Tar Heels topped the record from Saturday night by over 200,000 viewers, reaching 964,000 people.

The fourth-most watched game of the weekend was also the Chapel Hill Regional between Wofford and LSU, with 678,000 viewers.

The UNC Baseball program advanced in a thriller on Monday night, beating the defending national champs 4-3 in 10 innings. This result provided for a dramatic finish, and the team advanced to the Super Regional round, where it will host the West Virginia Mountaineers in a best two-out-of-three series with the winner advancing to Omaha and the College World Series.