A pair of titanic SEC rivalries helped ABC win another top-heavy college football Saturday, while FOX “Big Noon Saturday” finally showed life after several low-wattage weeks.
Saturday’s Georgia-Alabama college football game averaged 12.24 million viewers on ABC, trailing only Ohio State-Texas on ABC in week two (13.99M) as the most-watched game of the season. The Bulldogs’ win, which peaked with 13.8 million, delivered the sixth-largest regular season audience on the ESPN networks in the past decade, with three of the top ten coming in just the first six weeks this season.
The Georgia-Alabama rivalry accounts for two of the top ten, with their 2024 meeting placing seventh at 11.99 million. Nine of the top ten have featured SEC teams, the exception being Notre Dame-Miami on the opening weekend of last season (10.8M).
Viewership was also the highest on record for a regular season Georgia-Alabama game — obviously excluding their multiple meetings in conference and national championship games — and increased 17% from their meeting last season (10.42M).
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.
Earlier in the day, the Oklahoma-Texas Red River Rivalry averaged 9.82 million — the largest audience on record for the annual rivalry game, and the fourth-largest of the season.
Oklahoma’s upset win, which peaked with 15.7 million, increased 13% from the rivals’ meeting last season (8.73M).
Placing third for the weekend, FOX averaged 6.73 million for Indiana-Nebraska in its “Big Noon Saturday” window — the network’s second-largest audience of the season behind Michigan-Oklahoma in week two. The Hoosiers’ win, which peaked with 9.62 million, marked just the second time this season that FOX has won the Noon ET window, comfortably outdrawing ABC’s Texas A&M-Missouri game at 3.44 million.
No other game window hit the 3.5 million mark.
