Ohio State’s 14–7 victory over Texas on Saturday was the most-watched Week 1 college football game on record, as Fox drew 16.62 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings.

The game—which peaked with 18.57 million viewers just after 3 p.m. ET—marked Fox’s third-largest regular-season college football TV audience of all time. The final rating, nearly identical to what last year’s Georgia–Texas SEC championship game drew, is higher than any 2024 regular-season game, and all but five College Football Playoff broadcasts last season.

Beyond the intrigue of the then-No. 1–ranked Longhorns visiting the defending national champion Buckeyes, Fox may have benefited from the controversy around Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, who made his debut on the network’s pregame show, Big Noon Kickoff. Portnoy confirmed that Ohio State banned him from entering the stadium, which Front Office Sports first reported last week.

Saturday was also the final appearance of legendary analyst Lee Corso on ESPN’s College GameDay, which also broadcast live from Columbus. That pregame show drew a record 3.5 million viewers, per preliminary ratings.

Fox Sports executive Michael Mulvihill posted on social media that this past weekend of games across all networks “is easily the most-watched CFB Week 1 ever.” Mulvihill predicted total viewing will surpass 20 billion minutes, well above the previous high of 14.5 billion in 2023.

Thanks to some strategic scheduling by the NFL and big changes in audience measurement by Nielsen, it will be all but impossible for the league to show a viewership decline to start the 2025 season. 

As the regular season starts Thursday night in Philadelphia on NBC with the defending-champion Eagles and Cowboys, the NFL has frontloaded September with some of the biggest games on the schedule, a deliberate move designed to help provide crucial early momentum in league viewership. Among the key national games in the season’s first month:

• A Week 1 that, in addition to the kickoff game in Philadelphia, includes the NFL’s return to Brazil, this time on YouTube involving the Chargers and Chiefs, a late-afternoon Sunday clash on CBS involving the Lions and Packers, and a major Sunday Night Football game on NBC involving the Ravens and Bills, two of the three favorites in Super Bowl LX betting odds.
• A Super Bowl LIX rematch in Week 2 between the Eagles and Chiefs on Fox, and the start of Amazon’s Thursday Night Football schedule with the Commanders and Packers. 
• A Week 3 featuring a Monday Night Football clash on ESPN and ABC with the Lions and Ravens, and another strong Amazon game involving two AFC East rivals, the Dolphins and Bills.
• A Sunday Night Football clash in Week 4 involving the Packers and Cowboys, fresh off the high-profile trade involving Micah Parsons.

The NFL already had momentum after a 17% viewership bump during the preseason, and the introduction of Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel system, which materially expands its audience measurements. Even as the league still has issues with Nielsen and some of its methodology, though, high hopes abound for the upcoming season, particularly as the NFL has more games than ever in standalone windows.

“We always love our schedule going into the year, and in most years it plays up to our expectations, but we’re incredibly excited about what’s coming right out of the box” this season, said NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder.

Flex scheduling availability will begin in early October in certain instances, before taking full effect later in the season. Beyond that, Schroeder has touted current rights deals that “allow us to have any one of our 272 games in any [broadcast] window, any platform, any partner.”

A full-season viewership increase for the NFL would reverse last year’s 2.2% decline.

Big Sales at NBC

Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, meanwhile, said Wednesday that it has sold out entirely of its advertising inventory for Super Bowl LX in February, and that it has posted its biggest-grossing NFL season in company history. NBCUniversal has not detailed any Super Bowl pricing information, but prior reports centered on some 30-second units matching the record-level pricing of $8 million garnered last year by Fox.

The latest details from NBCUniversal show some of the fruits of a corporate strategy to pool sales efforts around a historic concentration of major sports events in February between the Super Bowl, the 2026 Winter Olympics, and the NBA All-Star Game. The announcement of the Super Bowl ad sellout is comparatively much earlier than those in each of the last two Novembers by Fox and CBS.

“Coming off of the strongest sports upfront in our company’s history, Super Bowl LX has generated extraordinary interest from brands and allowed us to sell out of our ad inventory earlier than ever,” said NBC Sports & Olympics EVP Peter Lazarus in a statement.

Charles Barkley has never minced words, and in his latest interview, he took some direct shots at both TNT and the NBA.

Speaking on Tuesday’s episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Barkley said that TNT has not been communicative about how it will approach its NBA coverage for the upcoming season. Front Office Sports reported that the network has licensed Inside the NBA to ESPN after TNT lost broadcasting rights to the NBA.

“TNT just sucks to be honest with you. They made this deal. They haven’t told us when we’re going to work. They haven’t told us how it’s going to work,” Barkley said.

TNT normally allows the crew of Barkley, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, and Shaquille O’Neal to run segments of the studio show for ten or more minutes without commercial interruptions. ESPN normally cuts to SportsCenter after an NBA game, while its halftime show is mostly made up of short segments separated by commercial breaks.

“I’ve really grown to hate the people I work for, to be honest with you. Because there’s a way you [should] treat people. We should not learn that we got fired or whatever from the internet,” Barkley said. 

He went on to say that he found out about the news that Inside the NBA was being licensed by ESPN after he received welcome texts from four ESPN talents. 

“About two hours later, I get a call from TNT. … How about if y’all signed the deal, call us four immediately and say, ‘Hey guys, we got a deal to trade y’all’s show to ESPN,’” Barkley said.

The 62-year-old also said that he nearly took a more lucrative offer to move to NBC, which included the entire Inside the NBA crew, but chose to stay when he realized that NBC was asking him to work on other events like the Kentucky Derby and Olympics. Barkley has said previously that he wants to work less, and even said last year he was going to retire from broadcasting, before reversing course months later.

Shots at the NBA 

Barkley criticized the NBA for its media-rights deal: an 11-year, $77 billion deal with ESPN, Amazon, and NBCUniversal that includes several exclusively streamed games on Prime Video and Peacock.

“I think the NBA has a big problem. How are they going to tell people which night the games are on?” Barkley said.

The NBA announced the full schedule for the 2025–26 season last month, which includes an additional 75 national games—though the count includes exclusively streamed games. By February, around when football season ends, there will be a national NBA game on every day of the week that will rotate between the three partners.

Barkley and Simmons agreed the league simply took the deal that offered them the largest payday without thinking about the experience for fans.

“I think it’s a big deal because they just took the money from all three networks. … For the next 11 years, they don’t give a shit about the fans,” Barkley said.