ABC swept a second-straight college football Saturday, led by the biggest Noon audience of the young season.
Last Saturday’s Texas-Tennessee college football game averaged a 4.6 rating and 9.75 million viewers on ABC, marking the largest Noon ET audience of the young season and third-largest across all windows. Texas has played in two of the top three, with their week two win over Ohio State placing first (13.99M).
The Longhorns’ win, which peaked with 12.9 million, also ranks as the most-watched Noon Saturday game on the ESPN networks since 2016. (Note that out-of-home viewing was not included in Nielsen estimates until 2020 or fully accounted for until 2025, that this is only in the second year of a new Nielsen methodology integrating “Big Data” from smart TVs, set-top boxes and first party data with its traditional panel, and that Nielsen has recently tweaked its measurement to better account for co-viewing of games.)
Viewership soared over last year’s comparable Arkansas-Memphis game, the least-watched game on ABC last season (2.11M).
ABC swept the top three spots in week four. Leading out of Texas-Tennessee, Mississippi-Florida averaged a 3.7 and 8.29 million — marking the most-watched game in that window this season and an increase over Auburn-Oklahoma last year (6.12M). Texas A&M-LSU placed third with a 2.6 and 5.71 million in primetime, actually down from last year’s pairing of Florida and Miami (6.46M).
The Big Ten rounded out the top five, with NBC’s Oregon-USC averaging 5.0 million across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (2.2 rating, 4.57M viewers) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — up 85% from Indiana’s year-ago rout of Illinois (2.7M). Iowa’s last-second upset of Michigan had a 2.1 and 4.46 million on CBS earlier in the day, down 16% from the Wolverines against Nebraska last year (5.30M).
Northwestern’s upset bid against Indiana helped FOX to a 2.0 and 3.86 million last Friday night, up from Iowa-Rutgers last year (3.01M). For the second-straight week, the network’s Friday night window outpaced its “Big Noon Saturday” slot, as Illinois-Ohio State had a 1.8 and 369 million — down from Texas Tech-Utah a year ago (4.04M).
ESPN led the cable slate with a 1.3 and 2.93 million for South Carolina-Alabama, followed by a 1.1 and 2.63 million for its Oklahoma-Georgia lead-in — both up sharply from last year’s equivalent matchups, South Carolina-Missouri (1.85M) and Tulane-Mississippi (1.05M). Those gains were offset by a sharp decline in the Noon window, as ESPN drew a 0.5 and 1.02 million for Wake Forest-Louisville — less than a third of the audience that tuned into Syracuse-Clemson last year (3.39M).
