Notre Dame scored a big victory on Saturday night, and so did NBC. The Irish's 47-40 double overtime victory over No. 1 Clemson was the most-watched Irish home game since the Bush Push game of 2005, and surpassed Georgia-Alabama for the most-watched game so far this season.
Below is a look at the 10 most-watched games of the 2020 season thus far.
All data courtesy Sports Media Watch.
A few takeaways:
-- Every one of these games was played after September, and five took place in the last three weeks. This trend will continue, as it does every year. CBS could score a huge number on Saturday night following a day of Masters coverage (which is why I argued the SEC should move the Iron Bowl up two weeks). Viewership always rises as the season crescendos: matchups get juicier, stakes rise, and the weather pushes people indoors.
But this list underscores how damaging COVID has been to college football as a TV product. Notre Dame at Georgia, for instance, drew 9.29 million viewers last season. LSU-Texas got 8.63 million, Oregon-Auburn got 6.86 million, and Texas A&M-Clemson generated 6.46 million. All of that inventory vanished like an explosion at a smoked turkey facility this season.
-- No one asked my opinion, but I'll never understand why ESPN and the conferences put the College Football Playoff on ESPN rather than ABC. The traditional broadcast networks have aired nine of 10 games on this list. Breaking news: Airing games to the largest possible audience tends to produce larger viewership numbers.
-- If you ever encounter a Big Ten, SEC, Clemson and/or Notre Dame fan who sincerely argues "the media" is "bias" against them, please slap them. Or just pull up this article and show it to them. Maybe just do the latter.
-- On that note, the Pac-12's experiment to play at 9 a.m. local time in order to catch Fox's "Big Noon Kickoff" audience was not a smashing success, at least not at first. USC's thrilling 28-27 comeback over Arizona State attracted 2.33 million viewers. That's the fourth-biggest number of the day and second in its time slot (West Virginia-Texas got 2.75 million in the same window on ABC).
Here's a look at the Big Noon Kickoff window throughout this season.
Sept. 12: Arkansas State-Kansas State -- 1.79 million viewers
Sept. 19: No game
Sept. 26: Kansas State-Oklahoma -- 2.68 million
Oct. 3: TCU-Texas -- 2.70 million
Oct. 10: Texas-Oklahoma -- 4.81 million
Oct. 17: Kansas-West Virginia -- 1.46 million
Oct. 24: Nebraska-Ohio State -- 6.18 million
Oct. 31: Michigan State-Michigan -- 4.22 million
Nov. 7: Arizona State-USC -- 2.33 million
It's too early to draw sweeping conclusions -- and COVID seating restrictions denied us a chance to measure how the crowd would have reacted to a 9 a.m. kick, good or bad -- but Football for Breakfast might be an idea best left for special occasions, like when a Big Ten power happens to travel West, like Michigan (at Washington) and Ohio State (at Oregon) were supposed to in September.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.