After both hit season-highs last week, pro and college football followed up with another strong performance in the week ending December 3.
FOX scored the fifth-largest audience of the NFL season for its Sunday national window (mostly 49ers-Eagles), with each of the top five coming in just two weeks and each of the top six coming within the past month. The NFL had two games cross the 25 million mark in Week 13, with NBC’s Sunday Night Football at 25.4 million across Nielsen (23.57M) and Adobe Analytics (1.86M). (Only the Nielsen numbers are presented in the below charts.) For the full list of NFL ratings this season, see the linked page.
As for the college game, the Alabama-Georgia SEC Championship Game was the most-watched in five years — and second-most watched in 14 — as 17.52 million tuned in. For the season, that trails only Ohio State-Michigan the previous week as the largest college football audience on any network (19.07M). More details here, and the full list of college football ratings is available here.
The College Football Playoff Selection Show averaged a 1.0 and 1.71 million on ESPN, a figure that includes all four hours of coverage — a nearly two-thirds increase in viewership over last year (1.04M).
The top non-football audience of the past week was 2.00 million for last Tuesday’s Warriors-Kings NBA In-Season Tournament game on TNT. More details on that game, and In-Season Tournament group play generally, are available here.
In other action, the post-singleheader window helped another small sport to an unusually large audience as Major League Fishing averaged 1.69 million on CBS. The final round of golf’s World Challenge — Tiger Woods’ first event since the Masters — averaged a 0.52 and 804,000 on NBC, with third round coverage at a 0.6 and 982,000.
Shifting to college basketball, FOX drew a 0.43 and 697,000 for Marquette-Wisconsin on Saturday; ABC averaged a 0.35 and 560,000 for UConn-Texas and a 0.33 and 489,000 for South Carolina-Duke in a women’s doubleheader on Sunday.
Weekly sports ratings, November 27-December 3
Only events with at least 100,000 viewers are listed. Household ratings of 0.55 or below are shown to the second decimal point.
Sunday, December 3
Saturday, December 2
November 30 – December 1
The full charts for Thursday, November 30 and Friday, December 1 are available in the daily ratings post for those dates.
— Thursday (11/30) sports viewership: Reese, Woods, move needle in returns
— Friday (12/1) sports ratings: Pac-12 finale dominates night
Wednesday, November 29
The ACC-SEC Challenge led Wednesday, November 29, though it was no match for the ACC-Big Ten Challenge a year ago.
Tuesday, November 28
As previously noted, Warriors-Kings led last Tuesday’s sports ratings with two million viewers on TNT.
Monday, November 27
Monday Night Football had another strong outing on November 27 despite a lackluster game between the Bears and Vikings.
