The new USFL ended its inaugural season with its largest audience since day two back in April.
Sunday’s Birmingham-Philadelphia USFL championship game averaged a 0.9 rating and 1.52 million viewers on FOX, the league’s highest rated and most-watched telecast since Houston-Michigan on day two of the season April 17 (1.1, 2.15M) and its third-largest audience overall behind that game and the April 16 season opener (New Jersey-Birmingham: 1.8, 3.07M). Viewership peaked at 1.83 million from 10:30-10:45 PM ET.
The USFL title game marked the first time that a new spring football league has made it to its championship game since the first iteration of the XFL in 2001. The 2001 XFL “Million Dollar Game” averaged nearly twice as many viewers (2.91M) on NBC, but in a different era of television that represented the smallest primetime audience of the week on the “Big Four” broadcast networks (the ninth-straight week the XFL ranked dead last, per a 2001 Variety article).
In the current era of television, the USFL title game ranked 46th out of the 63 total primetime shows on the “Big Four” last week, including a middle-of-the-road sixth out of the 11 on FOX — behind the previous night’s Major League Baseball coverage (1.89M), “WWE Smackdown” last Friday (2.14M), “Masterchef” last Wednesday (2.23M) and the pairing of “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” (1.82M) and “Beat Shazam” (1.81M) the preceding Monday.
The final championship game of the original USFL back in 1983 averaged an 11.9 rating on ABC — ranking 27th for the week.
For a more recent comparison, 13 of the 20 games in the XFL reboot two years ago — which was halted after five weeks — averaged more viewers than Sunday’s USFL Championship. That includes ten out of the 12 windows on broadcast television.
Locally, the game averaged a whopping 11.0 rating and 24 share in Birmingham, Ala., home of the champion Stallions and host to most of the USFL season.
Averages for the complete USFL season were not immediately available, but the regular season averaged 715,000 viewers per Sports Business Journal.
[Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 7.6, Fox Sports PR, Variety 4.25.01, Associated Press 7.23.83]
