ABC scored its best college football ratings in weeks on Saturday, averaging 8.2 million viewers for a tripleheader — the network’s most-watched weekend since Week 1 (8.6M) — immediately after its programming returned to YouTube TV following a two-week blackout.
The marquee windows delivered season-high marks: Oklahoma-Alabama averaged 10.48 million viewers (fifth-most watched game on any network this season) and Texas-Georgia averaged 10.43 million (seventh-most), with peaks of 14.1 million and 12.1 million respectively.
Those figures crushed the previous two blackout weekends, when no ABC game reached 8 million viewers (high of 7.8M for Georgia-Florida).Compared to the immediate prior week, Oklahoma-Alabama surged 115% over Texas A&M-Missouri (4.87M), and Texas-Georgia rose 38% from LSU-Alabama (7.54M).
Both games far exceeded ABC’s pre-blackout averages in those same windows (8.2M and 8.0M over the previous nine weeks), suggesting high-profile matchups — featuring four top-11 teams — were a major driver.
However, the YouTube TV blackout’s end clearly provided a lift in some dayparts. The noon ET Notre Dame-Pittsburgh game drew only 3.96 million (down slightly from the prior week’s 3.98M and well below the pre-blackout window average of 4.5M), ranking as ABC’s fifth-least watched game all season and reinforcing that non-SEC games struggle on the network.ESPN platforms also posted strong gains.
Texas A&M-South Carolina averaged 4.28 million on ESPN — the cable network’s most-watched Saturday game since Week 3 and the day’s top noon-window telecast across all networks. Additional ESPN windows hit multi-week highs, and “College GameDay” (2.6M) recorded its largest audience since Week 8, beating the blackout weeks by healthy margins and outdistancing FOX’s “Big Noon Kickoff” by 182% in its final hour.