Over ten million viewers watched Georgia end 2023 the way it began, with a record-setting bowl blowout.
Saturday’s Georgia-Florida State Orange Bowl averaged 10.3 million viewers on ESPN, per Nielsen fast-nationals, marking the largest audience for the game since 2017 (Wisconsin-Miami: 11.73M), excluding years in which it served as a College Football Playoff semifinal.
Georgia’s bowl-record 60-point rout, which peaked with 11.6 million viewers, delivered the largest audience of the bowl season thus far. The previous high was 9.6 million for the previous night’s Missouri-Ohio State Cotton Bowl. For the season, it third among college football games behind the Alabama-Georgia SEC Championship on CBS (17.52M) and Ohio State-Michigan on FOX (19.07M).
Viewership increased 20% from last year’s Tennessee-Clemson Orange Bowl, which aired on a Friday night (8.59M).
On paper, Georgia-Florida State should have been one of the better non-playoff bowls in the New Year’s Six era, as both teams had a credible argument for making the playoff. Defending champion Georgia was #1 for much of the season before losing to Alabama in the SEC title game, while Florida State was an undefeated Power 5 champion. Without a national title at stake, a number of Florida State players skipped the game — leaving a relative skeleton crew to compete against the virtually intact Bulldogs.
As previously noted, this year marks the final time that any New Year’s Six bowl will lack for title implications. All six bowls will serve as either a playoff quarterfinal or semifinal starting next season.
Earlier Saturday, the Mississippi-Penn State Peach Bowl averaged 7.7 million — up slightly from the last non-semifinal edition two years ago (7.65M). Mississippi’s win, which peaked with 8.6 million viewers, tops only the 2021 game as the least-watched Peach Bowl since 2015 (5.60M). Not surprisingly, every other Peach Bowl over that span has been a semifinal, led into a semifinal, or aired in primetime.
Next year, the Peach Bowl hosts a quarterfinal and the Orange Bowl a semifinal.
(Nielsen estimates from ESPN)
