Season two of “Coach Prime” is not drawing nearly as well as a year ago.
Saturday’s Colorado-Arizona college football game averaged 2.02 million viewers on FOX, marking the least-watched Buffaloes game on broadcast television in the Deion Sanders era. Across all networks, only one Deion-era Buffaloes game has averaged fewer viewers, a Friday night matchup against Washington State on FS1 last season (727K).
Colorado games have averaged 3.84 million viewers this season, down 49% from the first eight weeks of last season (7.59M). The team’s top game this season was their blowout loss to Nebraska on NBC in Week 2 (5.67M), while five of their six Nielsen-rated games at this point last season topped the seven million mark.
The Buffaloes’ blowout win declined 34% from Texas-Houston in the same window last year (3.08M) and trailed its Nebraska-Indiana lead-in on “Big Noon Saturday” (3.18M). FOX also drew Kansas State-West Virginia in primetime (1.14M). The two other games posted steeper declines, sinking 68 and 66 percent respectively from last year’s higher-profile windows, Penn State-Ohio State (9.96M) and Utah-USC (3.23M).
Head-to-head, it finished third in its mid-afternoon window behind 10.23 million for Alabama-Tennessee on ABC and 3.01 million for Michigan-Illinois on CBS.
As previously noted, the Alabama-Tennessee game was part of an “SEC on ABC” doubleheader that produced two of the season’s three largest audiences. The Volunteers’ win was the network’s most-watched afternoon game in nine years and the second-most watched matchup on record between the SEC rivals, behind their meeting on CBS two years ago (11.56M).
Compared to last year’s Tennessee-Alabama game on CBS, viewership increased 28% from 8.01 million. (Viewership increased more-than-fourfold from last year’s comparable ABC window, Washington State-Oregon at 2.35 million.)
Georgia-Texas followed with a 6.5 rating and 13.19 million viewers, marking the highest rated and most-watched college football game of the season — surpassing the previous highs of 6.0 and 11.99 million for Georgia-Alabama in September — most-watched primetime game during the regular season in a decade. (That of course excludes games like Michigan-Ohio State and the #1 vs. #2 LSU-Alabama game in 2019.)
Notably, the Alabama-Tennessee game had a higher peak audience (14.9M) than the Georgia-Texas game (14.4M).
ABC swept the weekend’s top three college football audiences, opening the day with 4.07 million for an ACC matchup of Miami-Louisville — up 88% from UCF-Oklahoma a year ago (2.17M) and the top game in a competitive Noon ET window that also featured Nebraska-Indiana on FOX and Auburn-Missouri on ESPN (2.45M).
In other action, FOX scored 2.15 million for Oregon-Purdue on its new Friday night package, topping ESPN’s late night Oklahoma State-BYU game (1.66M). NBC’s Big Ten primetime window hit a season low with 1.57 million for Iowa-Michigan State.
