Lane Kiffin’s return to Mississippi topped the charts on a college football weekend dominated by ABC/ESPN.
Saturday’s LSU-Mississippi college football game averaged 10.90 million viewers on ABC, marking easily the most-watched game of the weekend and the second-most watched of the young season. The Tigers’ loss, which peaked with 13.7 million, increased 43% from Florida-LSU in the same window last year (7.64M).
Viewership fell short of the previous week’s top five pairing of Ohio State and Texas, which drew just shy of 14 million in the same ABC “Saturday Night Football” window.
Going back further, the game ranks among the ten most-watched regular season windows on ESPN/ABC over the past decade (eighth).
(Note that out-of-home viewing was not included in Nielsen estimates until 2020 or fully accounted for until 2025, that this is only in the second year of a new Nielsen methodology integrating “Big Data” from smart TVs, set-top boxes and first party data with its traditional panel, and that Nielsen has recently introduced a tweak to its measurement to better account for co-viewing of games.)
Earlier in the day, the ABC portion of the weather-delayed Florida State-Alabama game averaged 7.01 million, the second-largest audience of the weekend. Coverage shifted to ESPN2 to make room for the start of LSU-Mississippi. The conclusion averaged 1.43 million, surpassing its SMU-Louisville lead-in (1.27M) and abbreviated New Mexico-Oklahoma lead-out (673K).
During the weather delay of FSU-Alabama, ABC simulcast ESPN’s coverage of Kentucky-Texas A&M. Across the full game telecast on ESPN and simulcast portion on ABC, the Wildcats’ rout of the Aggies averaged 5.36 million — placing third for the week.
(While the weather delays render any year-over-year comparisons moot, it is unlikely that either game would have come close to last year’s comparable Georgia-Tennessee audience of 12.58 million, delay or no delay.)
ESPN/ABC swept the top five and placed first and second in the Noon ET window, with ABC averaging 4.18 million for Georgia-Arkansas and ESPN 3.59 million for North Carolina-Clemson. Both windows were actually down from a year ago, when ABC averaged 4.51 million for Wisconsin-Alabama and ESPN 4.76 million for Clemson-Georgia Tech.
With the FOX “Big Noon Saturday” window saddled with Ohio State’s rout of Kent State, the network drew its top audience of week three on Friday night — averaging 3.03 million for Houston-Texas Tech. That topped ESPN’s competing Miami-Wake Forest game at 2.34 million.
