Say what you will about Big Noon, but the viewership is there. And it’s there in a big way for Fox.
Saturday’s marquee game between the Texas Longhorns and Ohio State Buckeyes averaged 16.6 million viewers on Fox, the most-watched Week 1 college football game for any network on record. Viewership peaked at 18.6 million viewers in the 3 p.m. ET quarter-hour. Per Fox, it is the third most-watched regular season college football game ever for the network.
It is important to note, viewership measurements for last weekend’s college football games are some of the first to include Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel methodology. The new methods allow Nielsen to draw on 75 million connected devices in addition to its normal sample of over 40,000 television homes in order to create a more accurate estimate of viewership.
It has been widely anticipated that the introduction of Big Data + Panel will serve to boost viewership measurements for live sports viewing compared to the old methods. A byproduct of that is there will likely be numerous viewership records this season, regardless of if a game truly had more viewers than a comparable game in previous years. As numbers continue to trickle out from this past weekend, and throughout the rest of this college football season, the true magnitude of this audience will come into more focus.
Nevertheless, 16.6 million viewers is a massive audience for a regular season college football game. The game absolutely blows Fox’s opening Big Noon Saturday game from last season out of the water. Fox kicked off the 2024 season with Penn State visiting West Virginia, a game that drew just 2.99 million viewers. Ohio State’s win Saturday drew over five times that audience. Fox also more than doubled its opening Big Noon game from 2023, when Deion Sanders’ debut at Colorado drew 7.26 million viewers.
Saturday’s game would also have ranked as the most-watched regular season game of the entire 2024 season. The most-watched regular season game last year was Georgia-Texas on ABC, which drew 13.19 million viewers in October.
However you slice it, Texas-Ohio State delivered for Fox. The question is just how much of that audience is a result of Nielsen’s updated methodologies, and how much was the benefit of having a top-5 matchup featuring a quarterback with the last name Manning. For that question to be answered, we’ll need to see the rest of this season’s viewership data.
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.