NCAA men's basketball title game wins ratings

New York • Unlike the men's basketball championship game itself, there was no contest in the ratings. Louisville's gripping victory over Michigan to win the NCAA tournament was easily the most popular event on prime-time television last week.

The game was seen by an estimated 23.4 million people, the Nielsen company said. That was a bigger audience than the last two men's championship games, and just slightly less than the 23.9 million who watched Duke beat Butler in 2010.

Only two scripted series finished in Nielsen's top 10 programs last week, Nielsen said. They were CBS' Tuesday night mainstays, "NCIS" and its spinoff, "NCIS: Los Angeles,"

For the week, CBS led with an average of 10.8 million viewers (6.9 rating, 11 share). Fox had 6.1 million (3.7, 6), ABC had 5.9 million (3.9, 6), NBC had 5.1 million (3.3, 5), ION Television had 1.2 million (0.8, 1) and the CW had 940,000 (0.6, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with an average of 3.7 million viewers (2.0, 3), Telemundo had 1.4 million (0.7, 1), UniMas had 520,000 (0.3, 0), Estrella had 180,000 (0.1, 0) and Azteca had 80,000 (0.0, 0).

NBC's "Nightly News" topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.3 million viewers (5.6, 11). ABC's "World News" was second with 7.5 million (5.1, 11) and the "CBS Evening News" had 6.2 million viewers (4.2, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.