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This weekend on pace to record largest viewership in college football history
By Keith Farner
Published:
College football fans have enjoyed the start of new season, and it’s showing up in television ratings.
With several games remaining on the Labor Day weekend, initial college football ratings have a chance to be the largest in history.
Week 1 CFB overnights up combined +16% across 5 networks through Sat games. Good chance to beat 2016, widely cited as best CFB Week 1 ever.
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) September 3, 2017
It continues a trend from last season where the first weekend drew big numbers, and the College Football Playoff showed growth and set several streaming records. An ESPN press release said the CFP National Championship had a 15.3 combined overnight rating, which continued a streaming record for the third straight year.
Some of the top games to start the 2016 season were Alabama-Southern Cal, Georgia-North Carolina, Clemson-Auburn, Texas-Notre Dame, LSU-Wisconsin, Ole Miss-Florida State and UCLA-Texas A&M.
For the CFP playoff, the three-game overnight average was up 8 percent from the previous season’s same three games and streaming audience is up 39 percent, 25 percent and 38 percent, respectively, in average minute audience, unique viewers and total minutes watched.
Two years ago, NPR reported that the first college football playoff championship game averaged 33.4 million viewers, the highest ratings in the history of ESPN and cable TV. That was a 21 percent increase over the ratings for the BCS National Championship between Florida State and Auburn.
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
