The Big Ten is no match for the SEC when it comes to the television ratings, but the conference continues to boast the single biggest individual game in college football.
Saturday’s Ohio State-Michigan college football game averaged 18.42 million viewers on FOX, marking easily the largest audience of the college football season. While the SEC on ABC has dominated college football viewership this season, FOX “Big Noon Saturday” owns the top two audiences — with Ohio State-Michigan surpassing the previous high of 16.6 million for Texas-Ohio State in week one.
The Buckeyes’ win, which peaked with 20.5 million viewers in the 2:30 PM ET quarter-hour, trails only two years ago on FOX (19.07M) and 2006 on ABC (21.04M) as the rivals’ most-watched matchup in the Nielsen people meter era. Keep in mind that Nielsen has changed its estimates in recent years to include out-of-home viewing and “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes, giving present-day viewership estimates a distinct advantage in any historical comparisons.
It is likely that at least two more prior year games — 2016 (16.84M) and 2022 (17.14M) — would rank higher all things being equal. But that would still put this year’s game in the top five.
As might go without saying, “The Game” also delivered the second-largest regular season college football audience on FOX, behind only the 2019 edition.
Viewership increased 49% from last year’s matchup of the teams, which saw Michigan enter unranked (12.32M). (Not counting the canceled 2020 edition, last year was the first since 2019 that “The Game” did not deliver the largest college football audience of the season.)
For the season, FOX won the Noon ET window seven times in 14 weeks — the same as last year. ESPN or ABC took top honors in the other seven weeks. FOX finished with four of the top six Noon audiences this season, including the top three, though the network finished in an even split of the top ten with ESPN/ABC.
