For a second-straight year, Ohio State and Texas met in front of an unusually large TV crowd.<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s Ohio State-Texas college football game averaged 13.99 million viewers on ABC, marking the largest regular season college football audience on the ESPN family of networks since ABC last carried Michigan-Ohio State in 2016 (16.8M).<\/p>\n
The Buckeyes\u2019 collapse, which peaked with 16.4 million viewers, ranks as the most-watched Week 2 college football game on record. Last year\u2019s matchup between the same two teams was the most-watched Week 1 game on record with 16.6 million on FOX.<\/p>\n
Note that Nielsen did not track out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020 or do so in 100% of markets until 2025, that it is only in the second year of a new methodology integrating \u201cBig Data\u201d from smart TVs, set-top boxes and first party data with its traditional panel, and that it has recently introduced a tweak to its measurement that is intended to better account for co-viewing of games.<\/p>\n
Viewership increased 45% from Michigan-Oklahoma in the same window last year (9.67M).<\/p>\n
The same Oklahoma-Michigan matchup ranked second for the week with 8.22 million in the FOX \u201cBig Noon Saturday\u201d window, up 92% from Iowa-Iowa State last year (4.28M).<\/p>\n
Week two was unusually top-heavy, with three games over seven million viewers \u2014 including ABC\u2019s Alabama-Kentucky at 7.28 million, up 52% from last year \u2014 and no others averaging even 3.1 million.<\/p>\n
Missouri-Kansas placed fourth for the week with 3.09 million on FOX Friday night, up sharply from last year\u2019s resumption of the rivalry, which aired on ESPN2 (1.83M). Arizona-BYU rounded out the top five with 3.01 million on FOX Saturday afternoon. ABC had just 2.53 million for Arizona State-Texas A&M, the network\u2019s least-watched SEC home game since acquiring rights.<\/p>\n
Over on ESPN, Oklahoma State\u2019s weather-delayed upset of Oregon averaged 2.14 million during the period in which it aired on ESPN. Coverage shifted to ESPN2 \u2014 and later ESPNews \u2014 to make room for the U.S. Open women\u2019s final, which averaged 2.7 million. The ESPN2 portion averaged 945,000 before being preempted for UCF-Pittsburgh, which averaged 859,000. ESPNews is not Nielsen-rated, so no viewership figure was reported for the conclusion of the game.<\/p>\n
ESPN also averaged 1.80 million for Tennessee-Georgia Tech and 1.04 million for Arkansas-Utah. For all the acrimony on social media over ESPN showing tennis, the U.S. Open women\u2019s final was the most-watched event on the network Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a second-straight year, Ohio State and Texas met in front of an unusually large TV crowd. Saturday\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[151617,151618,151619,151620,151621,151622,151623,151624,151625,151626,151627,27,29,28,151628,151629],"class_list":["post-437527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-big-12-tv-ratings","tag-big-ten-tv-ratings","tag-cfb-on-abc","tag-cfb-on-espn","tag-cfb-on-fox-sports","tag-cfb-ratings","tag-kansas-jayhawks-ratings","tag-ohio-state-tv-ratings","tag-oregon-ducks-ratings","tag-sec-tv-ratings","tag-tennessee-tv-ratings","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-texas-tv-ratings","tag-utah-utes-ratings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}