The networks are getting what they wanted from Nielsen’s methodological update.
After Fox announced a historic audience for its Week 1 game between Texas and Ohio State, ESPN revealed it, too, had a historic weekend of college football viewership. According to ESPN PR, citing data from Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel measurements, ABC averaged 8.6 million viewers across its four-game slate last weekend, with three games cracking the 10 million viewer threshold. It was the most-watched college football Week 1 on record for the network.
📈 @ESPNCFB delivered its BIGGEST Week 1 on record!
🏈 3 games with 10M+ viewers
🏈 8.6M avg. viewers across ABC (4 games); 4.0M avg. across all ESPN networks
🏈 @CollegeGameDay shatters record for its most-watched episode EVER with 4.0M viewers!More: https://t.co/5HksMoQ7IV pic.twitter.com/rjT78TFJLl
— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) September 3, 2025
Sunday’s Notre Dame-Miami game provided the network’s top audience of the weekend, averaging 10.8 million viewers on ABC, up 25% versus last year’s USC-LSU game in the comparable window (8.62 million viewers).
Florida State’s upset of Alabama was not far behind on Saturday, notching 10.7 million viewers itself, up 69% compared to Miami-Florida last season (6.35 million viewers).
And a top-10 matchup between LSU and Clemson earned 10.4 million viewers for ABC, up 31% versus Notre Dame-Texas A&M last season (7.92 million viewers).
The only lackluster audience on the Disney-owned broadcast network came at noon ET on Saturday, when Syracuse-Tennessee drew just 2.6 million viewers directly against the aforementioned Texas-Ohio State game, which averaged 16.6 million viewers on Fox. The Volunteers’ win was about one-third of ABC’s comparable window last year, Clemson-Georgia which drew 7.58 million viewers.
Of note, Monday’s TCU-North Carolina game, which featured Bill Belichick’s debut in Carolina blue, averaged 6.1 million viewers without the new Nielsen methods, meaning that number is likely to go up later. Already, that figure beats out last season’s Boston College-FSU game which averaged 4.44 million viewers.
Over on ESPN, South Carolina’s win over Virginia Tech led the way on Sunday afternoon, averaging 5.4 million viewers. Other notable games included Georgia Tech-Colorado (3.7 million viewers on Friday) and Nebraska-Cincinnati (3.3 million viewers on Thursday).
Of course, these numbers cannot be examined without the Nielsen caveat. These games are some of the first to be measured with the company’s new methods. It has been widely anticipated that the introduction of Big Data + Panel will serve to boost viewership measurements for live sports compared to the old methods, making comparisons to past years very muddied. As the season goes on, the true magnitude of these audiences will become clearer. But for now, we’ll have to wait and see.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.