I recently had a meeting with a very large national sports advertiser. They were evaluating the Seattle/Tacoma DMA. I unabashedly and with extreme bias pushed WSU.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Her response was an immediate “We don’t serve Pullman” and I kind of lost my cool. WSU might physically be in Pullman, but Western Washington is home to most of the alumni and fan base. It absolutely is a Seattle market sports team.
She finally agreed to look at some data, mostly to get me to calm down and leave.
I culled through some data and here’s my projections for 2026 for the average regular season Seattle–Tacoma audience per game across major sports properties:
Seattle Seahawks — ~531,000
UW Football — ~104,500
WSU Football — ~61,400
Seattle Mariners — ~55,800
Seattle Storm — ~25,000
Seattle Sounders — ~24,000
Seattle Kraken — ~20,000
That means a typical WSU football broadcast pulls roughly the same local audience as a Mariners game, and significantly more than most other regional pro sports broadcasts.
Factoring in basketball, annual regular season viewing hours in the Seattle–Tacoma market look like this:
Seattle Seahawks — 31.6M
Seattle Mariners — 18.1M
UW Athletics — 4.74M
Seattle Kraken — 3.28M
WSU Athletics — 2.87M
Nearly three million hours of television viewing in the Seattle market tied to WSU athletics every year.
If the Cougs ever make a run in the expanded College Football Playoff or a make March Madness, those audiences jump dramatically.
A single playoff football game would deliver 400K–600K Seattle viewers.
The point isn’t that WSU is bigger than anyone else.
My point is that Pullman isn’t the market.
Seattle is.
Rationale:
For WSU, I used 2024 and 2025 actuals from the exact or like matchups in 2026, assuming the same amount of clearance on CBS/CW broadcast, tier 1 and 2/3 cable.
I left UW alone year to year. They won’t have Ohio State this year, but they also won’t play Rutgers (Rutgers/UW did 11% of what Apple Cup did. Talk about a case for regional conferences, but I digress).
Postseason projections are based on UW’s 23-24 Sugar Bowl run.
The Mariners and Seahawks absolutely will have championship seasons 2026, so I gave them the actuals of their excellent 2025 performances.
Storm, Sounders and Kraken are based on Sports Business Journal and Sports Media Watch reports.
With the exception of one of these teams, I am a supporter of all of these brands. I know I have friends from stations and teams who sell all of these. If you disagree with any of the numbers here, leave your rationale in the comments. My intent isn’t to prove WSU is bigger than it is, rather to drive home that WSU is absolutely a Seattle team.
