Oklahoma’s last-minute win over Texas on Saturday delivered both the matchup’s best audience in 14 years and was the week’s most-watched college football game.
On ABC alone in the noon window, the game averaged 7.31 million viewers. ESPN2 also aired a Pat McAfee Show simulcast of the game, which added another 559,000 viewers to send the overall total to 7.87 million viewers. It’s good for the most-watched Red River Rivalry (excluding Big 12 Championship games) since 2009 (8.71 million, a 16-13 Texas win that aired on ABC).
CBS also had its best week of the season, averaging 7.23 million viewers for Alabama’s win over Texas A&M in the 3:30 p.m. window. ABC also claimed the primetime window, averaging 5.12 million viewers for Louisville’s upset victory over Notre Dame.
Fox picked up its best viewership in the Big Noon window for a game that did *not* feature Colorado, averaging 4.51 million viewers for Ohio State’s victory over Maryland. In the afternoon, Fox slipped to third (behind CBS and ABC, which averaged 3.02 million viewers for Florida State’s win over Virginia Tech) with 1.45 million viewers for UCF-Kansas, and the network was a disappointing fourth in primetime (behind ABC, ESPN, and NBC) for Fresno State-Wyoming (just 737,000 viewers).
Data for early season viewership darling Colorado, who rallied to beat Arizona State, was not available because their game aired on Pac-12 Network, which is not Nielsen-rated.
So far this season, ten games have topped seven million viewers. The distribution of those games has been pretty equal. Four have aired in the noon window, two in the afternoon window, two in primetime, one late night, and one on a Sunday evening. Three have aired on each of ABC and Fox, two have aired on ESPN, and one has aired on each CBS and NBC.
In Week 7, the biggest competition will come after the noon window. The early window features Georgia-Vanderbilt as half of a doubleheader on CBS, Indiana-Michigan on Fox, Syracuse-Florida State on ABC, and Arkansas-Alabama on ESPN. In the afternoon, ABC and CBS will go head to head with Oregon-Washington on ABC and Texas A&M-Tennesseee on CBS. In primetime, NBC has a USC-Notre Dame matchup that will likely end up winning the day, ABC has Miami-North Carolina, and Fox has UCLA-Oregon State.
As for Colorado, the Buffaloes are back on a Nielsen-rated network, but they’ll play in the late window Friday against Stanford on ESPN.
[Data via Sports Media Watch]
