USC-LSU Leads College Football Week 1 With Solid Sunday Opener For ABC

USC’s narrow win over LSU led the pack in Week 1 of the 2024 college football season with 9.2M viewers tuning into the game on ABC.

The game marks ABC’s third best Sunday Opener on record, which begs the question of whether it might have performed even better had DirecTV customers been able to watch. Instead, their Disney-owned channels went dark just minutes before kickoff due to a carriage dispute.

In fact, ESPN and ABC were undoubtedly the big winners of the weekend, delivering the top six most-watched games.

Notre Dame beat Texas A&M in the most-viewed ABC Saturday Night Football matchup in two seasons, managing an audience of 8.2M. Georgia’s domination of Clemson garnered 8M on ABC, making it the most-watched Week 1 noon game on record.

Miami at Florida came in fourth, also on ABC, with 6.7M viewers. ESPN rounded things out with the North Dakota State at Colorado matchup, which drew 4.8M, marking the network’s most-watched Thursday opener since 2017.

Boston College’s win over Florida State also had a solid audience with 4.4M viewers watching on ESPN.

Overall, the Disney-owned networks (ABC, ESPN and ESPNU) averaged 3.1M viewers across all of Week 1, which is up 44% over last season, according to ESPN.

Fox’s Big Noon Saturday telecast of the Penn State-West Virginia game averaged just under 3M viewers before it was delayed due to weather. The matchup was the biggest audience for Week 1 outside of the ABC/ESPN games, though it couldn’t quite sustain that audience for the resumption of play, which averaged 1.59M.

That’s a steep decline for Fox’s marquee college football slot, though understandable as last year featured the debut of Deion Sanders’ Colorado Buffaloes against TCU.

Also on Fox was the UTEP-Nebraska matchup, which got 1.67M before it was relegated to FS2 when Penn State-West Virginia resumed. The rest of the game saw just around 223,000 viewers tune in.

The Big Ten’s season debut featured Akron vs. Ohio State on CBS, which managed 2.97M viewers, also down from last year’s 4.65M for the Ohio State-Indiana opener. CBS’ primetime spot went to UCLA- Hawaii, which tallied 1.13M viewers.

NBC averaged 2.56M for its telecast of Michigan’s win over Fresno State. The CW showcased the Idaho State-Oregon State game to 381,000 viewers and the Portland State-Washington State game to 223,000.