ESPN\/ABC\u2019s college football game audience (3.2 million viewers) is off to its best start in 16 years, fueled by more strong numbers in Week 2. That comes a year after ABC, in its first year with the SEC\u2019s full rights, had its best season on record (5.8 million), while ESPN last year had its best season since 2016 (1.9 million). <\/p>\n
The best game on any network in Week 2 was Michigan-Oklahoma on Saturday night in primetime on ABC, which drew 9.7 million viewers. That was ESPN\u2019s best Week 2 game since 2006. That audience was around double the No. 2 game of the weekend, which was ABC\u2019s Ole Miss-Kentucky game in the 3:30pm ET window (4.8 million). <\/p>\n
For all of its games, ESPN\/ABC accounted for 60% of all CFB game minutes watched in Week 2. ESPN2 even got a boost from Kansas-Missouri in the 3:30pm window (1.8 million), marking the Deuce\u2019s best CFB game since 2022. <\/p>\n
Coming off its most-viewed episode ever with Lee Corso\u2019s finale<\/a>, \u201cCollege GameDay\u201d kept rolling and delivered its second-best regular-season episode all-time. The 2.6 million viewers across ESPN\/ESPNU from 9:00am-noon is up 22% over the same show last season (Big Data a big contributor again<\/a> to this audience jump). Last season, \u201cGameDay\u201d has its best audience in 40 years (not to mention a 14% jump among adults 18-24 in the first season with Pat McAfee a regular). <\/p>\n Fox had the third-best game of the weekend in its \u201cBig Noon Saturday\u201d window, with Iowa-Iowa State drawing 4.28 million viewers. Combined with Texas-Ohio State from Week 1, that noon ET window is now averaging 10.4 million viewers, which is up 52% from the start to last season and the best window for all of college football after Week 2. <\/p>\n Big Ten Network drew 1.87 million viewers for Grambling-Ohio State on Saturday, marking the cable network\u2019s best non-conference game on record. That passes Colorado-Michigan from 2016.<\/p>\n The CW drew its third-best CFB audience yet with Baylor\u2019s double OT win over SMU on Saturday afternoon (1.003 million viewers). That audience comes as the network prepares for its first matchup of ranked opponents this Saturday with USF-Miami (The CW President Brad Schwartz talked to my colleague Ben Portnoy about that earlier this week<\/a>). The number to beat for The CW? That\u2019s 1.3 million, which is its best CFB audience<\/a> (North Alabama-Florida State from 2023). The network\u2019s best sports audience is 1.8 million for a NASCAR Xfinity Series race from Daytona to start the 2025 season. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ESPN\/ABC\u2019s college football game audience (3.2 million viewers) is off to its best start in 16 years, fueled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[12,7,875,326],"class_list":{"0":"post-359664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-espn","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-fox-sports","11":"tag-sec"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115186131580605108","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}