Jan 22, 2026, 07:56 PM ET<\/p>\n
BRISTOL, Conn. — Top-seeded Indiana<\/a>‘s victory over Miami <\/a>in the College Football Playoff national championship game on Monday night was the most watched college football game in 11 years.<\/p>\n The Hoosiers’ 27-21 victory over the 10th seeded Hurricanes for their first football national title averaged 30.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen. It also is the second-most watched CFP title game and cable telecast on record. Ohio State’s win over Oregon in January 2015, still has the record at 33.9 million.<\/p>\n Editor’s Picks<\/p>\n 2 Related<\/p>\n According to ESPN, it was the most-viewed, non-NFL sports telecast since Game 7 of the 2016 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland. It is the fourth-most watched college football game in the last 30 years and the eighth-most watched ESPN production since the network started in 1979.<\/p>\n ESPN had its highest-viewed event on Sunday when the Houston Texans-New England Patriots NFL playoff game averaged 37.97 million.<\/p>\n Monday night’s audience peaked at 33.2 million viewers in the first half.<\/p>\n The 11 College Football Playoff games averaged 16.3 million viewers in its second year of the 12-team format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jan 22, 2026, 07:56 PM ET BRISTOL, Conn. — Top-seeded Indiana‘s victory over Miami in the College Football…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-424269","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}