The “SEC on ABC” continues to dominate college football viewership this season.
ABC averaged 12.9 million viewers for Georgia-Texas and 10.7 million for Alabama-Tennessee in a Saturday SEC doubleheader, per Nielsen fast-nationals and Adobe Analytics — marking the largest and third-largest audiences of the college football season, respectively.
The “SEC on ABC” now accounts for the three largest audiences of the season, with Alabama-Georgia last month ranking second (11.99M per Nielsen).
Georgia-Texas, which peaked with 14.1 million viewers, delivered the largest college football audience on the ESPN networks since ABC last carried Michigan-Ohio State in 2016 (16.84M). It trailed only that game as the networks’ most watched in a decade, since the 2014 Iron Bowl on ESPN (13.53M). Keep in mind that some intervening games, like Alabama-Florida State in 2017 (12.3M), likely had more viewers all things being equal, as Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020.
Excluding the SEC Championship, the Bulldogs’ win was the most-watched SEC conference game in about two years, since CBS drew 13.06 million for Tennessee-Georgia in November of 2022.
According to ESPN, Saturday marked the first time since 1996 that a single network had two games top the ten million mark in a single day. ABC also carried a Miami-Louisville ACC game on Saturday, figures for which were not immediately available.
ABC now owns 11 of the top 14 college football audiences this season, pending final results from the weekend. Four of the 12 most-watched games this season were created by the latest round of realignment — Georgia-Texas, Ohio State-Oregon on NBC the prior week (10.4M across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics), USC-Michigan on CBS last month (6.32M per Nielsen) and Tennessee-Oklahoma on ABC last month (6.27M per Nielsen).
