NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced that it has started releasing rankings of the most watched college football teams. In its first ranking, through the first 10 weeks of the season, Alabama is on top with 7.910 million viewers, followed by Georgia with 7.626 million viewers.
Nielsen also reported that through 10 weeks, college football viewership is up 4% from last year, comparing Big Data + Panel numbers to last year’s Big Data + Panel numbers from the same time period.
The top ten ranking showcases the teams with the highest viewership thus far this season, across ABC, Big Ten Network, CBS, the CW, ESPN networks, Fox and Fox Sports networks, NBC and TNT.
Those teams were:
The overall popularity of college football was also highlighted in a separate Nielsen ranking of the top 25 live sports events. College football secured 10 of the top 25 slots for live sports for the week of October 27 - November 2.
During that week, The World Series delivered five of the top 11 spots, including the #2 and #4 ranked telecasts (Fox). Game 7 (ranked #2) delivered 26.9 million viewers, the most for a World Series game since 2017.
In the Oct. 27 to Nov. 2 week, NFL Football secured 7 of the top 14 slots across 6 different networks/distributors: Fox, NBC, CBS, Amazon Prime Video, ABC, and ESPN. The most-watched NFL games aired in the CBS late-window. Nearly 31 million viewers tuned in for Chiefs-Bills in the late window, making it the the most-watched Week 9 game on CBS since 2007.
