With Georgia narrowly denying an upset bid by Kentucky, the SEC on ABC topped the college football ratings charts on Saturday.
Georgia-Kentucky averaged a 3.5 rating and 6.60 million viewers on a primetime edition of the SEC on ABC Saturday night, nearly tripling Pittsburgh-West Virginia in the same window last year (1.3, 2.41M) and the highest rated and most-watched college football game of week three.
For the season, the Bulldogs’ narrow win ranks fifth in viewership with ABC owning five of the top six — all for games involving SEC teams. (The top spot is held by a game on FOX, Texas-Michigan last weekend.)
In the same primetime window, Colorado’s rout of Colorado State averaged a 1.8 and 3.25 million on CBS — marking the least-watched Buffaloes game on broadcast television in the Deion Sanders era. Overall, it ranks as the fourth-least watched Colorado game since Sanders became coach, ahead of three late season games on cable last season — November matchups with Washington State on FS1 (727K) and Oregon State on ESPN (2.77M) and an October game versus Stanford (3.29M).
Last year’s Colorado State-Colorado game averaged a memorably-strong 9.30 million viewers on ESPN. The Buffaloes were undefeated at the time and narrowly avoided an upset loss.
Rounding out the primetime over-the-air slate, NBC drew just 1.29 million for UCLA’s first Big Ten conference game, a primetime matchup with Indiana — actually up 3% from Syracuse-Purdue last year (1.25M). FOX lagged with 1.03 million for UCF-TCU, down 14% from TCU-Houston last year (1.20M).
Earlier in the day, FOX placed second for the weekend with 5.03 million for Alabama-Wisconsin in its “Big Noon Saturday” slot — up 56% from Penn State-Illinois last year (3.22M). ABC was not far behind with a third-place 4.94 million for LSU-South Carolina in the same Noon ET window, a 42% jump over FSU-Boston College last year (3.48M).
In the 3:30 PM ET “SEC on ABC” window, Texas A&M-Florida drew 4.80 million — placing fourth for the weekend, but actually down 1% from Alabama-South Florida on the network last year (4.84M). Viewership also trailed last year’s comparable edition of the “SEC on CBS,” a matchup of South Carolina and Georgia that drew 5.42 million.
Notably, ABC’s 3:30 PM ET window — the direct successor to the SEC on CBS — has been its least-watched in all three weeks of the season, perhaps no surprise given it has featured moribund Florida twice in three weeks. The network’s top window each week has been its “Saturday Night Football” primetime slot.
The Aggies’ win dominated the 3:30 PM ET slot, cruising past the annual Civil War between Oregon and Oregon State at 2.82 million on FOX — dead even with Western Kentucky-Ohio State a year ago. The annual rivalry game used to be a Thanksgiving weekend matchup of conference rivals, but in the current era of realignment is now a non-conference matchup in September. (In the same window, Washington State played Washington in the annual Apple Cup, but that game aired on Peacock, which is not Nielsen-rated.)
It also dominated the “Big Ten on CBS,” which featured Notre Dame’s laugher over Purdue at 2.28 million — down 58% from last year’s aforementioned South Carolina-Georgia game.
Over on cable, winless Florida State’s latest embarrassing loss — to Memphis — topped the weekend charts with 1.59 million on ESPN, down 43% from LSU-Mississippi State a year ago (2.80M). UTSA-Texas had 1.48 million in primetime and Tulane-Oklahoma 1.39 million in between, down 72 and 12 percent respectively from Tennessee-Florida (5.31M) and Minnesota-North Carolina (1.58M) last year.
Shifting to Friday’s action, the debut of the new Friday night college football franchise on FOX (Arizona-Kansas State) drew 2.58 million — the network’s top Friday night audience since April and up 46% from the prior week. FOX previously aired WWE Smackdown on Friday nights. Despite the added competition, ESPN’s Friday night game window — UNLV-Kansas at 1.32 million — increased 45% year-over-year.
