UPDATE: UFC Freedom 250 posted an impressive average viewership of 7 million in the U.S. on Paramount+. So it turns out that the game did garner an audience as big as a football bowl, just not the Super Bowl. UFC Freedom 250 came close to matching the 2025 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl between Penn State and Clemson, which averaged 7.6 million viewers. So, congrats to all on posting bowl-like numbers.
ORIGINAL: In the era of alternative facts, no data point nor statistic should get in the way of good old-fashioned hyperbole.
That’s apparently the motto of Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is doing his best to uphold the rigorous fact-checking standards his party has become known for. During a recent appearance on Fox News, Gruters made the outlandish claim that more people watched the UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House lawn than watched the Super Bowl in February.
RNC Chair Gruters claims more people watched White House UFC fight than the Super Bowl
(The Super Bowl had more viewers than Paramount+, where the fight was exclusively streamed, has subscribers) pic.twitter.com/rdqa3PlgRZ
— FactPost (@factpostnews) June 17, 2026
“I think more people watched [UFC Freedom 250] than watched the Super Bowl,” Gruters claimed.
No doubt, the UFC card was a resounding success. Paramount+, the exclusive broadcaster for the event, reportedly quadrupled its normal download rates on the day of the fights. That said, even if every single active Paramount+ subscriber tuned in for the event, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to the latest Super Bowl viewership, which totaled 125.6 million viewers.
At the end of 2025, Paramount+ had a reported 79.6 million global subscribers. Of course, the Paramount’s UFC deal only accounts for the U.S. market, which touts about 35 million subscribers as of year-end 2025.
Those figures apparently don’t matter, because of course UFC Freedom 250 was the most-watched sporting event of all time! Who could bear to miss the historic event?
Joking aside, there won’t be any consequences for Gruters. These types of clearly false comments are baked into people’s expectations of his party these days. Maybe it was hyperbole, maybe it wasn’t. But Gruters could’ve made the same exact point by simply citing the very real, very positive data to have come out of the event so far. Outlandish claims that more people watched the event than watched the Super Bowl only serve to diminish the fact that, by all indications, the event was a success.
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.