College football conference title games see ratings take a dip: Sports on TV

The nations two leading college football conferences saw declines in the TV viewership for their respective championship games this past weekend. No. 1 Georgias 50-30 win over LSU in the SEC Championship Game averaged 10.89 million viewers for the mid-afternoon kickoff on CBS last Saturday. While it led the weekends college football audiences, it was

The nation’s two leading college football conferences saw declines in the TV viewership for their respective championship games this past weekend.

No. 1 Georgia’s 50-30 win over LSU in the SEC Championship Game averaged 10.89 million viewers for the mid-afternoon kickoff on CBS last Saturday. While it led the weekend’s college football audiences, it was down five million viewers from last year’s title game that saw Alabama upset the top-ranked Bulldogs.

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Michigan’s 43-22 win over Purdue in the Big Ten title game averaged 10.69 million in prime time on Saturday for Fox. That was a decline of about 1 million viewers from Michigan-Iowa a year ago, when the Wolverines had finally shed their Ohio State issue and appeared in the conference championship for the first time since its 2011 inception.

Neither of this year’s SEC or Big Ten conference championship games were much in doubt before they were played, which likely contributed to the softer TV viewership this year. The SEC game was one-sided from the start, too, while Michigan pulled away in the second half.

In other games, Kansas State’s 31-28 overtime upset of CFP-bound TCU in the Big 12 Championship Game had the weekend’s third-largest college football audience at 9.41 million for the noon kickoff on ABC. That improved over last year’s BaylorOklahoma State game’s 8.02 million.

Utah’s 47-24 upset of USC on Friday in the Pac-12 Championship Game, which knocked the Trojans out of the CFP, averaged 5.96 million viewers for Fox in prime time. That’s up from 4.2 million for 2021’s Oregon-Utah matchup.

Clemson’s 39-10 handling of North Carolina in the ACC title game averaged 3.46 million for ABC in prime time on Saturday. That also was better than last season’s version of the game, which averaged 2.66 million for PittWake Forest.

That brings us to bowl season (full TV schedule here) — which also means a wave of players entering the transfer portal, coaches jumping schools, and marquee players opting out to stay healthy ahead of next spring’s NFL Draft.

It also means some complaints that there are too many bowl games. Which, as my colleague Stewart Mandel pointed out, is balderdash. There are 40-plus bowls and people will watch them on TV.

This is a prime example of market forces at work. If there’s not a monetizable audience, ESPN (which owns and operates many bowls) and other networks and organizations would not spend the money to stage the games. Or not so many. There is, of course, some churn around the edges as minor bowls come and go.

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How enormous would TV ratings be for a Michigan-Ohio State CFP title game?

Bowls are here to stay because they generate TV viewership not only for the major games with playoff implications and prestige programs, but they fill up a December television schedule that’s otherwise pretty light during the holidays. Advertisers love that.

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Last year, the least-watched bowl was Middle Tennessee beating Toledo 31-24 in the Bahamas Bowl. It averaged 851,000 viewers for a noon kickoff on a Friday eight days before Christmas.

The Myrtle Beach Bowl, which somehow doesn’t have Kenny Powers as its mascot, between Old Dominion and Tulsa averaged 918,000 viewers for ESPN. That game was a 2:30 p.m. kickoff on Dec. 20 — a Monday!

Every other bowl topped 1 million viewers.

Last season’s 31 non-New Year’s Six bowl games on the ESPN networks averaged 2.57 million viewers, per Sports Media Watch. That was up 12 percent from 2020, which had just 28 bowls because of pandemic cancellations.

The lone non-ESPN bowl broadcast was by CBS, which had the Sun Bowl (Central Michigan 24, Washington State 21) at noon on New Year’s Eve that averaged 2.95 million viewers. Everything else was on a Disney-owned network — ABC, ESPN, ESPN2.

In this year’s non-ESPN bowls, Fox will air the Holiday Bowl (North Carolina vs. Oregon) at 8 p.m. on Dec. 28 while CBS again has the Sun Bowl (Pitt vs. UCLA, 2 p.m., Dec. 30).

Barstool Sports is the title sponsor of the Arizona Bowl that’s scheduled for 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 30 between Ohio and Wyoming. It’ll stream digitally on Barstool’s platforms rather than be broadcast on cable or over the air.

ESPN owns and operates 17 of the bowls through its ESPN Events division.

In addition to generating millions of dollars from selling commercial airtime during the bowls, network bowl deals can include the sale of naming rights and other sponsorships for the game to offset the media rights and production costs. Networks also enjoy value by cross-promoting other content in and around the bowl broadcasts, and brand affinity adds to the over value of the deals.

The cash cows are the New Year’s Six bowls (Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Peach and Fiesta), which have their own ownership structures (non-profits) and are often linked to tourism promotion. And the national title game will garner one of the biggest TV audiences of the year for any programming outside of the NFL (with serious viewership potential next month if Michigan and Ohio State have a rematch with the title on the line).

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Those elite bowls cost ESPN more than $600 million a year to broadcast, a figure that includes $470 million for the CFP semifinals that rotate among the six plus the stand-alone national championship game.

The 2022-23 bowl season also marks two full years since the COVID-19 outbreak forced the cancellation of 18 bowls in 2020-21. That meant millions of dollars in unrealized ad revenue for the networks, particularly ESPN. And the pandemic effects continued last year, with the Fenway, San Francisco, Hawaii, Military, Arizona and Holiday bowls canceled.

So far in 2022, all bowls are on. Fingers crossed!

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GO DEEPER

Mandel: To those who say there are too many bowls: Why do you hate fun?

IN OTHER SPORTS: Yes, more than college football is on TV. CBS’ late-afternoon national window for NFL games — it was almost entirely Chiefs at Bengals, with California and much of Nevada getting ChargersRaiders — averaged 23.4 million viewers. The network’s early-afternoon window, which was four games led by JetsVikings, averaged 13.69 million viewers.

Fox had a single-header NFL Sunday, meaning viewers got a 1 p.m. or 4 p.m. game. It averaged a healthy 19.17 million viewers. The network said that was its best single-header window since December 2019 — although the metrics then wouldn’t have accounted for millions of out-of-home viewers that Nielsen began measuring in summer 2020.

NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” telecast of Colts-Cowboys averaged 18.13 million. The number increases to 19.3 million with Peacock streaming included. SNF remains the most-watched primet-ime program of the NFL season, and this year is averaging 20.4 million linear and digital viewers, NBC said.

In World Cup action, Fox’s broadcast of the U.S. men’s 3-1 loss to the Netherlands in the round of 16 match on Saturday morning averaged 13 million viewers. NBC-owned Telemundo Spanish-language linear and streaming coverage averaged 3.58 million, bringing the domestic audience average to 16.5 million.

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That’s down from the last two USMNT knockout-round games — both extra-time losses — in the past two World Cups that the team made (it didn’t qualify in 2018). In 2014, a loss to Belgium on a late Tuesday afternoon averaged 18.1 million viewers on ESPN and Univision, while a 2010 loss to Ghana in the early afternoon on a Saturday averaged 17.9 million for ABC and Univision, per the Washington Post.

The USMNT’s next chance to generate a big World Cup home TV audience will come when the quadrennial tournament is staged in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada in 2026. The team’s record viewership remains the combined 24.7 million in English/Spanish in 2014 for the U.S.-Portugal 2-2 draw. ESPN averaged 18.2 million viewers and Univision average 6.5 million.

The 2015 Women’s World Cup final, featuring the U.S. against Japan, remains the biggest English-language soccer audience at 25.4 million viewers on Fox.

Check back for a full rundown of the World Cup viewership after the Dec. 18 final.

In men’s college basketball, the biggest audiences last week were 1.63 million for Indiana over North Carolina and 1.26 million for Duke over Ohio State, played back-to-back on ESPN on Wednesday evening. The top women’s hoops audience was 585,000 for No. 7 Notre Dame handling No. 3 Connecticut on ABC on Sunday afternoon amid NFL games on rival networks.

(Photo of the SEC champion Georgia Bulldogs: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)

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