The SEC won yet another college football weekend as Alabama-Mississippi dominated week eleven.
Alabama’s narrow win over Mississippi averaged a 4.8 rating and 8.71 million viewers on the SEC on CBS last weekend, marking the highest rated and most-watched college game of the weekend. The SEC on CBS has topped the charts in seven of its nine weeks on-air this season.
It delivered the fifth-highest rating and viewership of the college football season, with four of the top five games featuring at least one SEC team. Alabama alone has played in three of the top five, four of the top seven and five of the top nine games.
Ranking a distant second for the weekend, TCU-Texas scored 5.03 million on ABC’s Saturday Night Football — the most-watched Big 12 conference game this season and up sharply from Notre Dame-Virginia last year (~3.3M). Ratings were not immediately available.
The game topped a crowded primetime window that also included 3.63 million for Washington’s upset of Oregon on FOX — the most-watched Pac-12 conference game this season — and 3.34 million for Georgia-Mississippi State on ESPN.
Its Nebraska-Michigan lead-in ranked third for the weekend with 3.88 million viewers, down double-digits from Purdue-Ohio State a year ago (~4.7M).
Rounding out the top five were the aforementioned Washington-Oregon game on FOX and LSU-Arkansas on ESPN (3.57M). The latter more-than-doubled last year’s comparable window (Mississippi State-Auburn: ~1.5M) and delivered ESPN’s largest Noon ET audience in more than a year. The network won the Noon window for the first time this season, edging the Indiana-Ohio State “Big Noon Saturday” game on FOX (3.34M), Missouri-Tennessee on CBS (3.01M) and Notre Dame-Navy on ABC (2.07M).
In other action, FOX scored 1.86 million for its late night Arizona-UCLA game — comfortably topping Stanford-Utah in the competing window on ESPN (1.04M). Colorado-USC chipped in just 525,000 on FS1 last Friday night.
(Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily)
