‘College GameDay’ audiences didn’t tune out Ted Cruz appearance

There was a lot of grumbling about Sen. Ted Cruz’s appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay last Saturday, but audiences appear to have powered through.

Politicians are usually best appreciated waving from a luxury booth rather than speaking during sporting events. However, politics have been seeping into the soil around GameDay in recent weeks. After Nick Saban (himself a notable political advocate for college athletics) and Pat McAfee did an infomercial for the Protect College Sports Act two weeks ago, the show had the bill’s co-sponsor, Cruz, on last week to pitch its passage.

The reactions to the political blitz from a show that’s supposed to focus on college football games bothered many (including us), and it was reasonable to wonder if, like the fans booing him while he spoke, Cruz’s presence might turn off the TV audience as well.

As Puck’s John Ourand pointed out in his most recent The Varsity newsletter, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

“Per Nielsen numbers, 2.13 million viewers were watching ESPN’s College GameDay at the start of Cruz’s 10-minute segment—and 2.13 million viewers were still there at the end,” Ourand wrote.

Correlation does not imply causation, of course, so we can only infer so much from that, though it’s a good reminder that what you read on X and Bluesky does not usually reflect the intensity of opinion overall.

However, the two-week political push, coupled with the fact that neither episode offered any opportunity for an oppositional voice, raised hackles and questions not only about the show’s intentions but also about ESPN’s and Disney’s.

ESPN did offer a spot on Tuesday’s 6 p.m. SportsCenter for NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson to discuss the bill’s potentially negative impacts on college athletes. The reasoning was that it would air before the Senate voted on the bill, whereas an appearance on this weekend’s GameDay would come too late.

While a fair move in theory, Ourand noted that Tuesday’s SportCenter averaged 333,000 viewers, one-sixth the audience Cruz got on GameDay. Not exactly apples to apples.

The big question in all of this is how much corporations like Disney, Fox, Paramount, and Comcast, all of which have college football media rights, want the PCSA to become law, and are potentially using their media might to help sway public opinion.

“As much as the media may try to appear impartial on Cruz’s bill, multiple insiders have described it like this: ESPN supports its partner, the SEC, which wants the bill. And Fox Sports supports its partner, the Big Ten conference, which also wants the bill,” wrote Ourand. “‘There’s really nothing in the bill as it currently exists that could potentially harm media companies,’ one media executive said. ‘It’s a relatively benign position for Fox to support the Big Ten or ESPN to support the SEC.'”

It might feel benign to lofty insiders, but to the thousands of college athletes whose hard-fought rights might disappear, it feels more like influence and interference.