A lower profile matchup resulted in a smaller audience, but college football’s Ireland kickoff game still did well in the ratings.
Saturday’s Kansas State-Iowa State college football game from Dublin, Ireland, averaged 4.01 million viewers on ESPN (including an ESPNU “SkyCast”) — down about 20% from 4.99 million for Florida State-Georgia Tech last year, which was the most-watched “week zero” game since 2019. Keep in mind last year’s game had a direct lead-in from ESPN’s “College Gameday,” which took place from Ireland, while the traveling studio show did not air at all prior to this year’s game.
The Cyclones’ win, which peaked with 4.7 million in the 3:15 PM ET quarter-hour, still outperformed the 2023 Ireland game between Navy and Notre Dame on the NBC broadcast network (3.56M). It trailed the 2022 edition between Nebraska and Northwestern on FOX (4.42M). This year marked the fourth-straight season with an Ireland game in “week zero,” and it would have been the sixth-straight if not for the COVID-related cancellations of games in 2020 and 2021.
As might go without saying, the Ireland game was still the most-watched of “week zero.” In fact, it was the second-most watched sports telecast of the entire weekend behind the main portion of Sunday’s TOUR Championship final round on NBC.
In other action Saturday, FOX averaged 0.8 rating and 1.6 million viewers for Fresno State-Kansas, according to Programming Insider — topping a crowded primetime window in which CBS averaged a 0.7 and 1.3 million for Stanford-Hawaii, and ABC pulled a 0.50 and 867,000 for the North Carolina Central-Southern MEAC/SWAC Kickoff.
The “week zero” numbers are the final Nielsen “panel only” college football viewership figures, as the new Nielsen “Big Data” metric will become the industry standard starting next week. None of the numbers reported above will be included in season averages or future week-over-week comparisons, only their “Big Data” equivalents.
