In the season’s first skirmish between college football’s dominant media powers, FOX came out ahead overall while ESPN won out in the key demographics.
Thursday’s Purdue-Penn State college football game averaged 3.51 million viewers on FOX, down nearly half from Ohio State-Minnesota in the same window last year (~6.3M, pending revision) but the most-watched sporting event of the night. Ratings were not immediately available. FOX now owns the two largest audiences of the days-old season, with Nebraska-Northwestern last Saturday averaging 4.42 million.
Penn State’s win faced much tougher competition than last year, as ESPN’s competing West Virginia-Pittsburgh game averaged 3.15 million — several times higher than last year’s weather-delayed Boise State-UCF telecast (841K).
Notably, ESPN’s game won the head-to-head in each of the key young adult demographics — beating FOX in 18-34 (0.9 to 0.5), 18-49 (1.0 to 0.8) and 25-54 (1.11 to 1.05).
The Purdue-Penn State game originally belonged to ESPN, but the network traded its rights to FOX in exchange for the right to negotiate with NFL play-by-play voice Joe Buck, now the voice of Monday Night Football.
In other action, FS1 drew 402,000 for Central Michigan-Oklahoma State and 167,000 for Cal Poly-Fresno State, BTN scored 241,000 for New Mexico State-Minnesota and ESPNU chipped in 122,000 for Louisiana Tech-Missouri.
As for the pregame shows, ESPN’s special edition of College Gameday (852K) was no match for the FOX pregame (1.20M). Gameday aired in an earlier timeslot.
(Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 9.2)
