First Round playoff TV viewership falls flat

By Chris Marler

The initial television numbers for the first round of the 2024-2025 College Football Playoff were less than stellar. John Ourand from Puck shared the overnight numbers and they were disappointing to say the least.

We won’t see final numbers until later. But here are the overnights from the NFL vs the CFP.

Steelers-Ravens on Fox: 7.6
Texans-Chiefs on NBC: 7.4

Tenn-OSU on ABC/ESPN: 6.3
Indiana-ND on ABC/ESPN: from Fri: 5.7
Clem-Tex on TNT Sports: 3.6
SMU-Penn St on TNT Sports: 3.1

— John Ourand (@Ourand_Puck) December 22, 2024

All four games did at least a million less viewers than the regular season NFL games on during the same day. In fact the highest ratings from any game was Tennessee-Ohio State, which averaged 6.3 million viewers. That would have been nearly 800,000 less viewers than Ole Miss-Georgia from November (7.1 million).

Perhaps the most telling number of all is that the first round of the College Football Playoff didn’t have a single game that cracked the top 20 highest rated games in college football all season long.