Pushed a week into the new year, the first College Football Playoff semifinal of the 12-team era was on the lower end of the historical scale.
Thursday’s Notre Dame-Penn State CFP semifinal at the Orange Bowl averaged an 8.9 rating and 17.80 million viewers across ESPN (8.4, 16.92M), ESPN2 (0.39, 733K) and ESPNU (0.07, 144K), ranking just 16th out of the 21 total playoff semifinals.
Comparisons to past years are complicated by the new 12-team format, which has pushed the semifinals a full week past the New Year’s holiday. As a result, it should be no surprise that ratings and viewership fell sharply from last year’s first semifinal, Michigan-Alabama at the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day (13.0, 27.76M), and from TCU-Michigan at the Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Eve 2022 (10.0, 21.70M).
Notre Dame’s win actually increased from the previous Orange Bowl to host a playoff semifinal, Georgia’s New Year’s Eve rout of Michigan in the 2021-22 season (8.1, 17.19M). In fact, only one Orange Bowl in the playoff era has had a larger audience, Alabama-Oklahoma in December 2018 (19.07M).
Dating back to the start of the BCS era in the 1998-99 season, this year’s game ranks as the fifth-most watched Orange Bowl behind the aforementioned 2018 game, the two BCS-era national championship editions (2001 Oklahoma-FSU: 27.24M; 2005 USC-Oklahoma: 21.42M) and Penn State’s triple-overtime win over Florida State in 2006 (18.56M).
Pending results for Friday’s Ohio State-Texas Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl ranks second for the college football season behind the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl, now a CFP quarterfinal (21.09M). It should be noted that under the expanded format, it is the quarterfinals, not the semifinals, that benefit from elevated holiday season viewing.
