Preliminary viewership figures are in for the inaugural first round of the College Football Playoff. And as expected, ESPN’s games performed quite well while TNT’s fell victim to some stiff competition from the NFL.
According to Nielsen’s fast national measurements, as reported by ESPN, Saturday night’s Tennessee-Ohio State first round College Football Playoff matchup averaged 14.3 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN Deportes. The Volunteers and Buckeyes were the most-watched college football game of the weekend and the second most-watched college football game all season after the SEC Championship game between Georgia and Texas (16.6 million viewers).
Not far behind, Friday’s game between Indiana and Notre Dame averaged 13.4 million viewers across the ESPN family of networks, good for the third most-watched game of the season so far.
Obviously, with this being the first ever opening round of the newly expanded 12-team playoff, there are no prior games to compare these audiences to. However, given both primetime games ranked in the top-three largest audiences so far this year, it’s safe to say there was significant interest.
The viewership story is not so favorable for TNT, however, who sublicensed a pair of first round games from ESPN.
Clemson-Texas — which aired at 4:00 p.m. ET on Saturday afternoon and competed directly with the Pittsburgh Steelers-Baltimore Ravens game on Fox — drew an audience of 8.6 million viewers across TNT, TBS, truTV, and Max, according to TNT Sports PR. That audience would rank as just the 15th most-watched college football game of the year, lower than the Army-Navy game on CBS a week prior, for instance (9.4 million viewers).
The SMU-Penn State game at noon ET averaged just 6.4 million viewers across the TNT Sports family of networks. Penn State’s win also faced significant NFL competition from the Houston Texans-Kansas City Chiefs game at 1:00 p.m. ET on NBC. However, the game falls outside of the top-20 most-watched college football games of the year.
It should be noted that despite both TNT games ranking well down the list of most-watched games of the year, they were the top cable-exclusive college football broadcasts this season.
According to TNT Sports PR, the pair of games rank as the two most-watched college football games ever on the network. TNT aired college football for nearly two decades before stopping in 2006. It’s safe to say that, although the superlatives sound good, TNT’s viewership would’ve been quite a bit higher had it not faced direct NFL competition.
It’s hard to imagine that two games that rank well outside the top-10 most-watched of the year is what TNT executives had in mind when the network paid nine-figures to sublicense these games.
Overall, the first round of the College Football Playoff averaged 10.6 million viewers across the ESPN and TNT Sports networks. It’ll be interesting to see whether this schedule — one where the first round games endure significant NFL competition — continues next season.
Figures for the competing NFL games were not immediately available, though will presumably be quite a bit higher given the NFL’s standard of viewership and the league’s use of broadcast networks over cable.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.