Kirby Smart and Greg Sankey Georgia coach Kirby Smart and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey (R) after the 2024 SEC championship on Dec. 7, 2024. Georgia won 22-19. (Joshua L. Jones/Online Athens, via Imagn Images.)

A fascinating part of college football has long been the debates around which teams are the biggest viewership draws.

This comes into play in everything from conference realignment to bowl selection and has even been discussed around College Football Playoff slots (although the CFP committee doesn’t admit using that as criteria). But per-team viewership numbers aren’t always easy to come by, especially with many teams playing on a wide variety of networks over the course of the season. And that makes a new decision from ratings firm Nielsen (which provides the most-cited TV ratings) to release their own list there quite interesting.

Here’s a table of the top 10 teams by average viewership, based on data from a Nielsen release Wednesday. The top 10 has eight SEC teams (including Georgia at No. 1, 1.8 million clear of Ohio State at No. 2) and two Big Ten teams. We’ve also included those teams’ positions in the final CFP rankings for context:

A table of per-school average CFB ratings for 2024 from data Nielsen released, with schools' final CFP rankings included for context.
A table of per-school average CFB ratings for 2024 from data Nielsen released, with schools’ final CFP rankings included for context.

Here’s a table of the viewership champions of each conference:

A table of conference viewership champions for 2024, based on Nielsen data.
A table of conference viewership champions for 2024, based on Nielsen data.

Here’s some more information from that Nielsen release:

College football continues to be a significant draw across networks owned by Disney, Fox and NBCU, with football helping them rise in Nielsen’s Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge this fall. This season, over 154 billion minutes of college football have been watched live across Disney, FOX, NBCU and other networks. 

…Georgia was boosted by its matchups against Alabama in week five (12 million viewers) and SEC newcomer Texas in week 8 (13 million viewers). The latter stands as the most watched game of the regular season. 

The Big Ten, which now boasts 18 teams, is typically not far behind the SEC in terms of audience interest. Thus, it’s no surprise to see Ohio State and Michigan in the top 10, at numbers 2 and 7, respectively. The two Big Ten teams’ top appearance came in week 14 when they faced one another, attracting 12 million viewers. 

There are some important methodology notes here as well. Those include that this is all based on Nielsen’s live+same day panel numbers, that audience averages counted for both teams in each game, that all conference network games were excluded because not all conference networks are Nielsen-rated, and the team rankings only included schools that appeared in at least four counted games across networks.

Back in 2019, we put together a list of the top CFB teams that season by viewership by manually inputting Nielsen data for each available game for the top 15 teams. We used total viewership instead of average viewership, but the top 10 then were quite similar, albeit in a different order. Here’s that list for comparison:

2019 regular-season viewership numbers for the top 15 teams in the Week 15 CFP rankings.
2019 regular-season viewership numbers for the top 15 teams in the Week 15 CFP rankings.

Six of those top ten teams from the 2019 season remain in the 2024 Nielsen top ten, with the exits being Auburn, Oklahoma, Penn State, and Notre Dame and the additions being Texas, Tennessee, Texas A&M, and Kentucky. So that’s at least a slight boost for the SEC and its expansion (and that fits with the season-long trend of SEC on ABC dominance), and it should be noted that a lot of those individual schools (perhaps Kentucky in particular) are gaining from the high-profile opponents they played. But, while Nielsen only released the top ten schools by viewership here, their note that the Big Ten “is typically not far behind the SEC in terms of audience interest” suggests there may be several Big Ten schools close to this list.

A big change since 2019 is the Top 10 going entirely to two conferences. 2019 had three conferences represented in the Top 10 (with Oklahoma still in the Big 12 at that point) plus Notre Dame, and two more (the ACC and Pac-12) just outside. So that may add to the fears of the Big Ten and SEC dominating the sport.

But, an interesting change from 2019 is that half of these Nielsen Top 10 teams finished unranked by the CFP committee (of course, some of that is due to them getting viewership credit for losing to other top-drawing teams), and the No. 1, No. 4, and No. 5-ranked teams (Oregon, Penn State, and Notre Dame) didn’t make this top 10 viewership list. So the rankings and eventual inclusion decisions definitely weren’t all about viewership this year.

It’s appreciated to see these numbers from Nielsen and to also see them release the most-viewed team in each conference. While the data here comes with plenty of caveats based on schedule, opponent, network billing, competition in a window, and so on, it’s good data to have. And it provides a good starting point for discussions about how schools stack up in viewership.

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.