Despite pitting two of the most prominent programs in college sports, college football’s national championship delivered one of its smaller audiences.
Monday’s Ohio State-Notre Dame College Football Playoff National Championship averaged a combined 22.1 million viewers across the Nielsen-rated ESPN networks, marking the fifth-least watched national title game since the debut of the CFP predecessor, the Bowl Championship Series, in 1998.
Three of the five least-watched title games have come in the past five seasons, with Georgia-TCU two years ago the least-watched (17.2M) and Alabama-Ohio State in 2021 the second-least watched (19.1M). The two other title games in the bottom five are USC’s rout of Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl 20 years ago (21.4M) and Miami-Nebraska in the 2002 Rose Bowl (21.6M).
The Buckeyes’ comfortable win, which peaked with 26.1 million viewers in the 8:30 PM ET quarter-hour, declined 12% from Michigan-Washington last year (25.1M).
Despite the decline, the title game edged out the Ohio State-Oregon Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day to rank as the most-watched game of the college football season — marking the first time in three years and only the second in five that the title game has taken top honors.
Several factors contributed to the relatively low figure, which was still the top non-NFL sports audience since last year’s Super Bowl. The game took place on Inauguration Day, which almost certainly resulted in greater cable news viewing than is typical. The fact that the game aired as late as Inauguration Day in the first place is another factor, as the expanded 12-team playoff pushed the season a week further into January.
The matchup pit the teams ranked fifth and sixth at the end of the regular season, a departure from title games that had previously consisted of top four — or in the BCS era, the top two — teams. Notre Dame was not expected to keep pace with the Buckeyes, and while they kept the score respectable, the game largely followed expectations.
Perhaps most importantly, ESPN is now said to be in just 65 million homes, a figure that makes it highly difficult to reach the kind of audiences that were once commonplace for the national title game. When the Buckeyes previously won the National Championship in the 2014-15 season, ESPN was in more than 90 million homes — and the title game, the first of the playoff era, averaged 34.1 million viewers.
The title game accounted for more than half of television viewing in the adults 18-49 demographic Monday night, an indication both of the resilience of live sports as a television property and of the decline of linear viewing. With fewer people watching television overall, even a smaller audience will account for a greater piece of the pie.
