The 2024 college football ratings have had some ups and downs so far.
With ESPN in particular, their ABC games posted great numbers in Week 1, but the overall story has been a bit more mixed. But it’s interesting to see that in the season’s second week of games, they had exceptional ratings for pregame show College GameDay:
📢@CollegeGameDay‘s Wk 1 show at @TAMU started the season strong as the 3rd most-watched regular season episode of ALL TIME
🏈2.5M avg. viewers
🏈3.2M final-hr viewers
🏈Up 47% from ’23’s Wk 1
🏈Most-watched reg. season episode since Nov. ’16
🏈Most-watched pre-Nov. episode EVER pic.twitter.com/dIQlFaFQdx— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) September 4, 2024
The “most-watched regular-season episode since November 2016” and “third most-watched regular-season episode of all time” qualifiers certainly stand out. Unlike some past GameDay record-setters, this one was not before an incredibly hotly anticipated matchup.
Yes, the No. 7 Notre Dame – No. 20 Texas A&M clash Saturday night was one of only two ranked-on-ranked fights in Week 1 (the other was No. 14 Clemson vs No. 1 Georgia, which wound up as a 34-3 blowout for the Bulldogs, an even wider gap than the Irish’s 23-13 win over the Aggies). It was our pick for the featured game in the evening window, but it wasn’t a particularly highly demanded game. That didn’t stop GameDay from doing numbers.
Beyond the strong ABC ratings to date (with Week 1 giving them their best performance since 2016 despite the ongoing DirecTV dispute), part of ESPN’s success to this point has been about GameDay. That show also posted a Week 0 record from Ireland ahead of Georgia Tech-Florida State. While the 1.6 million viewers were well below the 2.5 million this week, they were remarkable for Week 0 (and 41 percent above the previous high-water mark there).
The new-look GameDay with the addition of Nick Saban (yes, Tuscaloosa News, that’s what he’s doing now) has certainly produced lots of discussable moments, and some solid ratings as well.
[ESPN PR on X/Twitter]
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.