After plenty of back-and-forth with this year’s College Football Playoff viewership, the tournament ended on a historically strong note.
ESPN said late Thursday that Indiana’s 27–21 win over Miami on Monday in the CFP championship game averaged 30.1 million viewers, up 36% from last year’s title game involving Ohio State and Notre Dame, which averaged 22.1 million viewers, and ranking as the second-most-watched CFP national championship matchup on record.
The total also represents the most-watched college football game of any kind since the 2014–15 season, and culminated a topsy-turvy run of audience data during the tournament. First-round viewership sagged 7% from last year amid stiff NFL competition, followed by quarterfinals that surged by 14%, and then the two semifinal games that retreated by double-digit percentages.
The last college football game to attract as many viewers was the inaugural CFP title game, won by Ohio State over Oregon in January 2015, when the event began with a four-team format.
Overall, the latest CFP finished the entire tournament with a per-game viewership of 16.3 million, up 4%. Before the championship game, though, the event was flat in its television audience from last year. The Hoosiers’ win over the Hurricanes peaked at 33.2 million viewers in the first half and ranks as the most-watched U.S. sports telecast, outside of the NFL, since Game 7 of the 2016 World Series.
While Nielsen methodology enhancements, such as an expansion of out-of-home tabulation and the arrival of the Big Data + Panel measurement process, help explain some of the viewership boosts, the latest figure also bolsters college football’s argument as the most popular sports entity in the U.S. behind the NFL.
For ESPN, meanwhile, the latest results extended a banner week for the Disney-owned outlet following a NFL divisional playoff game on Sunday between the Texans and Patriots that averaged 38 million viewers on the network and sister channel ABC. That figure was the single-largest audience in ESPN’s history, spanning more than 46 years.
Indiana’s victory, meanwhile, sealed a perfect 16–0 season that instantly ranks as one of the most dominant runs ever in college football.
