We are now staring at a second weekend of ESPN networks being off YouTube TV thanks to an extended carriage dispute with the streaming provider.
With a full weekend of college football and Monday Night Football now in the rearview mirror, there really isn’t a deadline for both sides as we’ve already gone over the cliff of missing games. Much like the prolonged government shutdown, it now seems to be a matter of which side blinks first.
But while the impact of the YouTube TV standoff is certainly being felt by ESPN’s bottom line, is there a tangible impact on its ratings?
ESPN, and more specifically ABC, has dominated the competition this year in college football thanks to their all day SEC lineup. During many weeks, ESPN has had the top game at both Noon, 3:30 p.m., and 8 p.m. ET up against Big Ten and other games on Fox, CBS, and NBC.
However, that was not the case last weekend. Fox finally scored a win with Big Noon Saturday thanks to Ohio State’s clash with Penn State. Fox drew 7.19 million for that game up against just 4.51 million for Texas-Vanderbilt on ABC. However, Georgia-Florida was the top game of the day on ABC with 7.79 viewers.
In primetime, it was a different story. The Oklahoma-Tennessee game plummeted to 4.81 million viewers. By comparison, last week’s ABC primetime drew 6.7 million.
Front Office Sports attempted to draw the connection between the YouTube TV outage and the falling numbers in an article entitled, “YouTube TV Loss Weighs on ABC’s CFB Ratings While Fox Sees Lift.” That YouTube TV angle drew a rare public rebuke from ESPN president of content Burke Magnus. While not referencing the carriage dispute directly, he had another reason for the low primetime ratings.
The ABC primetime game also happened to be going up against Game 7 of the World Series.
Maybe…just maybe…Game 7 of the World Series had an impact on the primetime audience for College Football…or maybe that didn’t fit the conclusion you were trying to create?
— Burke Magnus (@burkemagnus) November 5, 2025
That Game 7 between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays reached an astonishing 25.98 million viewers on Saturday night. It was the most watched baseball broadcast since 2017.
You could say that College GameDay was affected as it drew just 2.0 million viewers on Saturday from Utah, down from its 2.7 million season average. On the flip side, over a million people were watching on Pat McAfee’s live X stream, but ESPN can’t monetize those viewers. But again, it was a rare week when Big Noon Kickoff had a distinct advantage in being at the better game and leading in to Ohio State-Penn State.
It’s impossible to parcel out the exact impact of the YouTube TV dispute on ESPN because there are so many factors when calculating ratings. What is the competition? What is the draw of the brands and matchups on display? There are plenty of variables at play and each network always tries to win the narrative game no matter what the raw data may say.
Of course ESPN is going to downplay the impact of not being on YouTube TV on their ratings because to do otherwise would eliminate a massive amount of leverage. Is there a loss in viewers? Of course, how could there not be! Look at what happened with Monday Night Football being down 21% from last year in spite of the Cowboys playing. But trying to put an exact number on it is more or less a guessing game. Let’s just hope we don’t have to play it for very much longer.
About Matt Yoder