The Athletic: Is the college football TV ratings boom hitting a wall?

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For hardcore TV ratings geeks, the 2025 college football season was a non-stop source of content and gushing network press releases about viewership records. The numbers were up, up, up and up. But roughly halfway into the 2026 season, those PR releases have slowed to a crawl.

And with good reason: It’s been bad news for almost everyone.

But first, a rewind.

Nielsen ratings have historically relied on a representative “panel” of around 40,000 homes with special set-top meters. As of Sept. 1, 2025, those ratings now combine that traditional data with automated data from 45 million households with SmartTVs or cable boxes. That change alone caused a 7.5 percent baseline bump for college football viewership, Nielsen said. But the 2025 season shot even beyond that, with a striking 11 percent growth across all networks.

Now for the bad news. Through Week 8 this season, there were 131 Nielsen-rated games on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN, with an average of 3.3 million viewers. That’s down 6 percent from the same period in 2025, when 124 games averaged 3.5 million. Fox, helped by its expanded Friday night lineup, has been the only one of the five to avoid a drop. NBC and CBS were down by double-digit percentages, and ESPN came close.

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The SEC continues to dominate the TV ratings game thanks to its exclusive deal with ABC/ESPN. SEC-controlled games are averaging 5.3 million viewers, up slightly from last season and well above the Big Ten’s 3.6 million average. The Big Ten’s games on Fox, CBS and NBC are down a collective 10.4 percent from 2025.

The Big 12, which splits its games between ABC/ESPN and Fox, is enjoying a viewership surge of 9.2 percent, fueled by BYU’s upset of No. 2 Notre Dame, followed by UCF’s upset of No. 2 BYU. The ACC, however, has cratered by 44 percent year-over-year, from 4.1 million to 2.3 million. The root cause: Three 10 million-plus Week 1 matchups last year (Alabama-Florida State, LSU-Clemson and Notre Dame-Miami) flipped from ACC home games — for which the conference controls the media rights — to away games.

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So what exactly is going on here?

College football has long been the nation’s second-most popular sports property behind only the NFL and has seen its viewership numbers rise nearly every year since Nielsen began counting out-of-home viewership in 2020. Why the sudden turn?

There are likely several different potential factors, some more visible than others. After crunching the Nielsen data several different ways, I have four theories of my own.

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