After the least-watched semifinals in the history of the College Football Playoff, the National Championship bounced back in a big way.
Monday’s Indiana-Miami College Football Playoff National Championship averaged 30.1 million viewers across the ESPN networks, officially ranking as the most-watched national title game since Ohio State-Oregon in the inaugural year of the CFP in the 2014-15 season (34.15M).
The Hoosiers’ win, which peaked with 33.2 million, increased 36% from last year’s Ohio State-Notre Dame title game (22.1M) — well beyond the range that would be explained by Nielsen’s methodological changes of the past year, namely the expansion of its out-of-home viewing sample and shift to a new methodology that combines “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel.
Those changes will generally skew historical comparisons, particularly to the years before Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its estimates in 2020. It is highly likely that a game like Alabama-Georgia in 2018 — which averaged 28.44 million with zero out-of-home viewing or “Big Data” — would rank higher all things being equal.
Officially, Indiana-Miami ranks as the fourth-most watched title game since the beginning of the Bowl Championship Series in 1998. It trails only the 2006 Texas-USC Rose Bowl (35.63M), Ohio State-Oregon in ’15 and the 2010 Alabama-Texas BCS National Championship (30.78M). But as noted, it would in all probability trail several other games if Nielsen had tracked out-of-home viewing prior to 2020 — particularly Ohio State-Miami in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl (29.10M), Florida-Ohio State in the 2006 BCS title game (28.80M) and the aforementioned Alabama-Georgia in ’18.
Nonetheless, an audience north of 30 million did not seem to be in the cards coming off of the semifinals, which were the least-watched in the CFP era. Nor did it seem likely given the recent trend; four of the previous five national title games rank among the six least-watched of the BCS/CFP era.
Indiana-Miami recorded the largest non-NFL sports audience since Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, and while historical comparisons are skewed by Nielsen’s various changes, there are not many other events with a close enough audience for methodology to matter. Game 7 of the 2017 World Series had 28.29 million without aid of out-of-home viewing or “Big Data,” a figure that almost certainly ranks higher all things being equal — but that still puts the title game at a more than eight-year high.
While viewership declined for both the semifinals and the first round of the CFP — the latter of which faced tougher NFL competition than a year ago — increases for the title game and quarterfinals helped the full 11-game playoff to an average of 16.3 million viewers, up 4% from last year. While that is well within the range that can be fully explained by Nielsen’s methodological changes, viewership was trending level with last year’s average entering the title game.
