Even on the softest week of its season, the SEC topped yet another college football weekend.
The “SEC on ABC” topped a 12th-straight college football weekend as Arkansas-Texas was the most-watched game of week thirteen with 5.61 million viewers. That is easily the smallest audience of the season to qualify as the largest of the week, as the top game in every other week this season had at least six million.
In addition, the Longhorns’ win — which peaked with 6.5 million — topped only Texas A&M-Missouri in week ten (4.87M) and Mississippi-Kentucky in week two (4.78M) as the least-watched mid-afternoon game on ABC this season. That midday window has been the network’s most-watched.
That performance was still good enough to not only top the week, but beat the marquee USC-Oregon game on CBS head-to-head. The Ducks’ win, which was the site of “College Gameday,” averaged 5.43 million — the second-largest audience of the week and second-largest CBS audience of the season.
Oregon has played in the three most-watched CBS games, with their loss to Indiana placing first (5.59M) and comeback against Iowa third (5.37M).
The SEC on ABC actually won all three competitive timeslots on Saturday. Missouri-Oklahoma topped the Noon ET window with 5.37 million viewers, an above-average figure for ABC that ranks as its fourth-largest audience in that window this season. The Sooners’ win, which peaked with 6.3 million, comfortably surpassed the audience of 4.06 million that watched the competing Rutgers-Ohio State “Big Noon Saturday” game on FOX.
Tennessee-Florida averaged 4.76 million, marking the network’s least-watched primetime game this season (if one does not count the MEAC/SWAC Kickoff in week zero), but still easily the top game in that window.
ABC is now averaging 6.8 million viewers for college football games this season, behind 2006 as its second-highest 13-week average on record. Keep in mind that Nielsen this year changed its methodology to combine “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel, which has generally (though not exclusively) resulted in larger audiences. Between that change and Nielsen’s February expansion of out-of-home viewing, this year’s games have a built-in advantage over last year — to say nothing of years prior to 2020, when out-of-home viewing was not included in Nielsen estimates.
As for ESPN’s “College Gameday,” Saturday’s edition from Oregon averaged 2.7 million viewers — the show’s fourth-largest audience of the season. It actually ranks as the fourth-most watched edition all-time, with this season accounting for the top eight, though the aforementioned Nielsen methodological changes provide a caveat.
“Gameday” is now airing for free on the ESPN app and social media for the remainder of the regular season. (The social media audience would not factor into the Nielsen-estimated viewership figures.)
