December appears to have been a record-setting month for most of FS1’s daily shows, though not all of them.
According to Fox Sports PR, The Herd with Colin Cowherd, First Things First, and Speak all garnered their biggest December ratings in program history.
🚀🚀🚀@FS1's afternoon lineup featuring @TheHerd, @FTFonFS1 & @SpeakOnFS1 caps 2023 with record-setting viewership across the board 📈 pic.twitter.com/auiSAPbNZC
— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) January 4, 2024
For The Herd, December 2023 saw an audience that was 23% higher than December 2022 and capped the most-watched year the program has had since its inception in 2015.
Meanwhile, First Things First saw December numbers that bested the prior year’s by 73% and also ended what was the show’s most-watched year on record (since 2017), topping 2022’s audience by 82%.
As for Speak, they also garnered the best December in show history, which dates back to 2016 when it was called Speak for Yourself. While they saw a 22% rise in audience from 2022, they fell just short of putting up the best yearly numbers in show history, finishing No. 2 overall.
That’s all well and good but it’s impossible not to notice that there is no mention of Undisputed, the Skip Bayless-led debate show that was once their flagship daily program. Yes, the announcement was specific to their afternoon programming, but we can presume that, unlike the aforementioned trio, Undisputed did not hit December or yearly highs. That’s not too surprising, given the lack of enthusiasm that has surrounded the show since it returned from Shannon Sharpe’s departure with a collection of co-hosts who are all interesting personalities but not the kind to move the needle.
Meanwhile, thanks in part to Sharpe spurning Skip to Stephen A. Smith, ESPN’s First Take is thriving and putting up record numbers. In early December, it was reported that First Take was beating Undisputed head-to-head by more than 400,000 daily viewers between September to November with the Smith-led show averaging 554,000 viewers compared to just 120,000 for Bayless and Co.
FS1 certainly has a good thing going in the afternoons, but there’s no denying that they appear to have a Skip Bayless-sized problem on their hands in the mornings.
