Posted on 12/27/2017 10:55:34 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
The decline of NFL viewership has rightfully been one of the biggest sports media stories of the past two years but less has been written about where college football stands in aggregate viewership. College football is a tougher game to analyze for ratings experts given a number of factors including the innate regionalism of the sport, and the massive number of national windows between ESPN’s multiple networks, Fox and FS1, CBS and CBSSN, NBC and NBCSN and others.
One of the best analysts at making sense of sports television and digital ratings is Austin Karp, the assistant managing editor of Sports Business Daily. Last week Karp examined the 2017 regular season viewership for college football and found that CBS, ABC, NBC and ESPN all posted significant declines this season. Fox was the one outlier, with record-high viewership thanks to its new Big Ten deal. Karp said ratings were not available for conference channels like SEC Network, Big Ten Network and Pac-12 Network.
Per Karp, here’s where the networks finished for average viewership for this year’s CFB regular season:
CBS: 4.951 million viewers, down 10% from 5.489 million in 2016.
ABC: 4.203 million, down 18% from 5.097 million.
Fox: 3.625 million, up 23% from 2.951 million.
NBC: 2.742, down 3% from 2.814 million.
ESPN: 2.155 million, down 6% from 2.300 million.
FS1: 819,000, up 4% from 743,000.
Some interesting thoughts from Karp in the piece: CBS's SEC package was the most-viewed individual package for the ninth straight CFB season, but this year’s average was its lowest in well over a decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at si.com ...
Minor thugs just waiting for the call to become major thugs...............
Bye, Bye, anti-American thugs.
The article fails to take into account that almost all of the conferences offer streaming of their games. Some offer it free, while others charge a fee for it. I personally don’t believe viewership is down, I believe people are moving toward other platforms to watch college football.
My primary complaint about TV coverage of college football is that so many of the game announcers are just plain awful.
You can take the boy outta the ghetto, but’cha can’t take the ghetto outta the boy-weeee
Bingo. I went through the system too from peewee upwards. Never had a problem with the obama kids. It’s only when obamatard became prezzy that the problem just resurfaced.
Actually, the percentage of college football players that become NFL players is very, very small.
Mizzou is way down for the same reasons as the NFL.
It isn’t just sports, if you look the entertainment industry as a whole is tanking, pro sports are entertainers and part of the same crowd, as well as News channels, Newspapers, magazines,.....
WINNING!!!
The colleges have killed the conferences, which are now nothing but television marketing scams. As traditional rivalries decline, so does fan interest. College football has just become a minor pro league, and so few teams are really competitive that fans are losing interest. Old habits die hard and the gray haired crowd still cheers for the alma mater, but the disinterest among the student body is growing fast.
But they all be hopin’!..................
America is reassessing football. Parents of regular kids know it’s a dead end sport for them.
Agreed. None of today's announcers have any originality and I keep hearing the same phrases over and over.. "as you can see he's got all the tools."
Since I am boycotting the NFL I’ve found that college ball is much more exciting than the NFL and without the anti-patriotism the NFL tolerates and even condones. College kids play their hearts out whether they have a chance at the NFL or not. It’s a faster, more wide open and offensively imaginitive game that is more appealing to me.
Would dumbass bowl names have anything to do with it?
And, “they really came here to play football today”.
Yeah, I love watching people who hate me amuse themselves.
They need to name them “Toilet Bowl 1”, “Toilet Bowl 2”...:-)
In particular, that woman play-by-play announcer on ESPN!
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