The storylines we miss when we argue about college football TV ratings

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I’m sorry for the strange publishing schedule this week. But Lord willing, I’ll be completely recovered by early next week. Important life lesson: Turns out, you can’t go back to work just a few hours after major surgery. Well, I guess you can try … but you’ll fall asleep while the CMS is still open, and nobody wants that.

Anyway, I’ve begun to notice more national conversation about the state of college football TV ratings. The Athletic published a story this week that suggested that, after years of ratings booms, folks just aren’t watching college football quite as much this season.

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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.

Stew Mandel-The Athletic

These decreases come on the heels of substantial changes to how Nielsen measures week-by-week data, as the company seeks to better capture what folks are watching at bars and on phones and other devices. So it’s entirely possible that the actual decline in viewership is even more dramatic than 6 percent over the past year.

My humble opinion is that this conversation doesn’t really matter all that much for the regular ol’ fan. Nobody gets a dividend check in the mail if TV ratings are awesome, and the number of people watching — or not watching — doesn’t immediately change anything for your favorite team or conference. The TV contract is already signed, after all.

But if you work in the College Sports Industrial Complex, well, you do need to care about this stuff. And while I think it is fair to speculate about whether this season’s weaker early schedule, the bloat of mega-conferences, playoff fatigue or any number of other factors may be contributing to viewership declines, it’s also worth taking a closer look at the actual data.

The analysts over at Playfly shared some numbers (updated through Week 8) with me, and I think they paint at least a more nuanced picture than just “RATINGS ARE DOWN, EVERYBODY PANIC.”

Ratings aren’t down for everybody. Congrats to the Pac-12 (and late-night football enjoyers everywhere).

Via Playfly:

There are a few likely reasons for the significant increases year-over-year. The new Pac-12 TV deal broadcasts football games across CBS Sports, the CW and USA Network, all linear channels that are easy to access on most major streaming platforms. Major games aren’t behind subscription or streaming paywall services, making them much easier to find.

It’s also probably helped that the top of the Pac-12 has been pretty good at football! Boise State is a close loss to Oregon away from being undefeated, and it looks to battle New Mexico down the stretch for a spot in the College Football Playoff. Oregon State has been must-see-TV, thanks to Jesse Legree emerging as one of the most dominant wideouts in all of college football. And Texas State and Fresno State have been more than competent.

Would the league want somebody other than Washington State, which sits in last place, to be its most-watched team? Yeah, probably. But other than that, the news looks decidedly positive.