ABC records best CFB Week One numbers since 2016

The first full week of college football turned into quite the bounty for Disney’s ABC. Their four weekend games drew remarkable numbers, including Sunday’s “Vegas Classic” USC Trojans’ win over the LSU Tigers:

Sunday’s instant thriller from the #VegasKickoffClassic delivered 9.2M viewers on ABC, peaking at 11.1M

ABC scored its second-most-watched Week 1 on record with 8.0M viewers across 4 games pic.twitter.com/uWZkUB1vfs

— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) September 2, 2024

As noted in that graphic, this was ABC’s second-most-watched opening weekend ever (following 2016). And the USC-LSU game from Vegas was their third-most-watched Sunday night opener ever. That’s perhaps especially notable considering that this came amidst a dispute with DirecTV that removed ABC owned-and-operated affiliates (including those in Los Angeles and San Francisco, two important USC markets) from DTV proper, and other ABC affiliates from their digital MVPD DirecTV Stream. As Jon Lewis wrote at Sports Media Watch, though, the numbers here still wound up very good for ABC, including by comparison to past USC games:

The Trojans’ win, which peaked with 11.1 million viewers, delivered ABC’s largest audience of the opening weekend, topping Notre Dame-Texas A&M on Saturday night.

…It was also the most-watched game involving USC since the 2017 Cotton Bowl against Ohio State (9.47M) and the Trojans’ most-watched regular season game since their 2012 matchup with Notre Dame (16.1M).

It’s significant to see that on several fronts. And one is that both USC and LSU are programs ESPN talking heads spend a lot of time on.

Noted USC critic Paul Finebaum had to eat some of his words on that front Monday, but he’s far from the only one who was talking about that game before or after it. And a lot of people were able to watch it, apart from DirecTV carriage disputes or random Hawaii commercials/news breaks, and many of them certainly chose to Sunday. And that helped ABC to overall success.

[ESPN PR on X/Twitter]