Ohio-State Michigan game leads College GameDay megashow to best viewership ever

In anticipation of maybe the biggest game of the college football regular season, #2 Ohio State vs #3 Michigan, College GameDay had its biggest show ever. GameDay expanded to a Super Bowl-like five hours for The Game and the rest of Rivalry Week.

The intrigue surrounding The Game and its implications for the College Football Playoff helped lift GameDay to a record audience, at least for its normal three hour timeslot.

In the history of College GameDay that goes all the way back to 1990, it’s never drawn a bigger audience in 382 episodes than it did last Saturday. From 9 AM – 12 PM ET, GameDay averaged an impressive 2.68 million viewers. Even the bonus two hours of programming from 7 AM – 9 AM ET averaged almost a million viewers.

Via ESPN:

College GameDay Presented by The Home Depot from Ohio State on Saturday, Nov. 26 (9 a.m. – noon ET), was the show’s most-watched regular-season episode on record (382 episodes), garnering a total live audience of 2,682,000 average viewers.

ESPN’s TV audience (2,614,000 viewers) is the largest for the show since November 24, 2007, from Kansas City – which includes all episodes since the show expanded to three hours in 2013 – and is the second best for the program. Saturday was the most-streamed episode of GameDay, earning an average minute audience of 68,000 viewers.

Saturday’s College GameDay began with a special start time in advance of the epic showdown between Michigan and Ohio State, with the extra two hours (7 a.m. – 9 a.m.) delivering a total live audience of 885,000 average viewers.

It’s amazing that GameDay has been on the air for over 25 years now and the program seems to be stronger than ever before. The transition from Chris Fowler to Rece Davis went incredibly smoothly and the show has as strong of a cultural influence as ever, from Lee Corso’s headgear to the creative signs that all the fans bring. With the NFL’s ratings trending downward this season and Monday Night Football seeing its fair share of struggles, at least ESPN can take heart that the college game is doing very well being boosted by the success of traditional powers.

[ESPN]