Lee Corso’s swan song delivered a record audience for ESPN’s “College Gameday.”
The Week 1 edition of ESPN’s “College Gameday,” which marked the final appearance of the retiring Lee Corso, averaged 3.5 million viewers according to Nielsen fast-nationals — the largest audience ever for the show. (The fast-nationals are based on Nielsen’s panel-only viewership, which as of Monday will no longer be reported by the networks. The final, official viewership for the finale will be based on the new Nielsen “Big Data” metric.)
As might go without saying, viewership peaked in the final quarter-hour — when Corso made his final headgear pick — at 5.1 million viewers.
Corso’s farewell increased about 40% over last year’s Week 1 edition of “Gameday,” which at the time was the third-most watched episode of the show with 2.5 million.
The previous Nielsen-measured “College Gameday” record was set in November 2007 when the show visited the site of a #1 vs. #2 matchup between Kansas and Missouri (2.62M). Keep in mind it was two hours long back then. Since the show expanded to three hours in 2013, the most-watched episode prior to Saturday was a November 2016 edition at the site of a #2 vs. #3 Michigan-Ohio State game (2.61M).*
“Gameday” averaged nearly as many viewers as the previous week’s actual game between Kansas State and Iowa State, which drew 4.01 million across ESPN and ESPNU. The “Gameday” peak audience of 5.1 million exceeded that of last week’s game (4.7M).
Figures for Saturday’s week one games — including the Texas-Ohio State game that was the site of “Gameday” and the competing FOX “Big Noon Kickoff” — will not be available until Wednesday.
(* The November 2016 edition was actually a five-hour show, the longest in “Gameday” history, but the first two hours were counted as a separate program.)
