No. 1 Alabama’s win over No. 5 Georgia naturally brought a lot of viewers to ESPN and ABC.
ESPN announced Tuesday. The University of Alabama’s 41-34 victory over the Bulldogs drew an average audience of 12 million viewers, with a peak audience of just over 14.1 million. That number was no doubt helped by Georgia’s spectacular comeback after Alabama jumped out to an early 28-0 lead. If the Crimson Tide had cruised, ratings would have dropped significantly. Instead, Georgia scored steadily throughout the second half and briefly took the lead on a 75-yard TD pass from Jalen Milroe to Ryan Williams with less than three minutes left.
The game was the most-watched game on the ESPN network since 2017 and the most-watched regular-season prime-time game on any network since that season, the network said. The Crimson Tide was ranked No. 4 at kickoff, but the win moved Alabama to No. 1 in Sunday’s AP Top 25. Georgia State fell from second to fourth place.
The game would have ranked second among all 2023 regular season games in viewership behind Michigan’s win over Ohio State in the final week of the regular season. The battle of undefeated teams drew just over 19 million viewers. A season ago, the second most-watched regular season game was the University of Colorado-Oregon loss. The Buffaloes entered that game undefeated, and Deion Sanders’ first season in Boulder was the talk of college football.
ESPN and ABC’s huge viewership numbers are why they paid so much money to acquire exclusive broadcast rights to SEC games starting in 2024. Alabama and Georgia each played in seven of the 100 most-watched college football games in the 2023 season. After airing ACC, Pac-12 and Big 12 games on Saturday nights a season ago, ABC now exclusively airs SEC games in prime time. And they’ll have another chance to draw big viewership in three weeks when Georgia travels to Texas and Alabama visits Tennessee. One of these two top-five matchups will definitely take place in prime time.
