The SEC football package continues to pay big dividends for CBS Sports, which announced Thursday that the SEC on CBS is “the highest-rated regular season college football package on any network,” pulling in a 3.4 rating and 8 share on average. CBS also claims the two most-watched games so far this season, Alabama’s 29-15 SEC championship win over Florida on Dec. 5 (7.8/17, with an average of 12.76 million viewers) and Alabama’s 30-16 win over LSU in prime time on Nov. 7 (an average of 11.06 million viewers).
CBS’ success here isn’t really an outlier, as college football packages continue to draw well for a variety of networks. Fox posted a 12 per cent average viewership increase in 2015 for their Big 12/Pac-12/Conference USA package, plus nabbed 9.8 million viewers (with a 5.7/11 rating/share) for the Big Ten championship game despite competition from the ACC and Pac-12 games. ESPN also saw a 4 per cent rise (to 1.85 million average viewers) across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews and ESPNU, and a 2 per cent rise (to 2.72 million average viewers) on ESPN proper. So, college football is working pretty well for everyone.
The “SEC Game of the Week” package seems to be paying the biggest dividends in terms of raw viewers, though, and it’s been huge for CBS. This was the 20th year the Eye carried SEC football. With numbers like this, it’s easy to imagine they’ll be quite happy to continue paying the bargain price of $55 million a year for their package until 2023-24.
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About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.