This illustration, apparently from Harper’s magazine in 1885, is titled
“A College Foot-ball Match — a Scrimmage.”
Via Wikimedia Commons
There will be college football games with bigger audiences this season — heck, very possibly this week — than the 8.1 million cross-platform viewers NBC and Peacock drew for Notre Dame’s season-opening win over Wisconsin on Sept. 6. But it’s not very likely that any of them will be the top primetime show of the week.
Why? Because the NFL season began Wednesday, and the three primetime games this week (two on NBC/Peacock and one on Netflix) are likely to pull in more viewers than any college game — and so will most of the weekly Monday, Thursday and Sunday night contests in the rest of teh season. But on Labor Day weekend, before the NFL starts, college football can sit at the top of the TV heap.
Four of the top 10 primetime shows, and eight of the top 20 regardless of time, last week were college games. That concentration will also go down some with the onset of both the NFL and the regular network TV season later this month and in early October. But Labor Day weekend? Unless/until the NFL decides to start playing games that count before then, it’ll belong to the college crew.
On Monday, I noted that these weekly ratings would be delayed and that I’d probably send a combined on-air and streaming ratings newsletter tonight. Well, Nielsen decided to hold the streaming numbers until Friday, so look for that post, plus maybe a little extra data analysis (emphasis on “maybe”), over the weekend.
The top network and cable shows for last week are below, and since eight of the sports top 10 is represented in the all-day rankings, I’m going back to the top 10 syndicated programs for the last chart.