YouTube TV Loss Weighs on ABC’s CFB Ratings While Fox Sees Lift

The ongoing Disney–YouTube TV carriage dispute appears to have had a noticeable impact on college football TV ratings across multiple networks this past weekend.

Since Friday, more than 20 Disney channels, including ABC and all ESPN networks, have been unavailable on the No. 4 U.S. pay-TV distributor, which has an estimated 10 million subscribers.

With major college football games not available on YouTube TV on Saturday, ABC had its third-lowest combined audience of the season for its weekly tripleheader. The trio of SEC games, which featured five ranked teams, averaged 5.7 million viewers:

• Georgia-Florida: 7.8 million
• Oklahoma-Tennessee: 4.8 million
• Vanderbilt-Texas: 4.5 million

Oklahoma-Tennessee is ABC’s lowest Saturday primetime audience of the season, and the only game in the network’s 7:30 p.m. ET slot to draw fewer than 6 million viewers. That broadcast faced direct competition from Game 7 of the World Series, which drew 27.3 million viewers on Fox. ABC’s three-game slate marked just the second time through 10 weeks of college football action that multiple games on the network had fewer than 5 million viewers.

Crunching the Numbers

Georgia-Florida was still the most-watched matchup of the weekend, and up from the roughly 7 million viewers the rivalry game drew on the same weekend last year on ABC. ESPN said it also marked the largest Georgia-Florida audience on record in a full national window.

In second place was the Saturday audience of 7.19 million who watched Penn State–Ohio State on Fox. While that’s down from nearly 10 million viewers for last year’s game on the same weekend, when both teams were ranked in the top five, it is Fox’s second-largest college football audience of the season.

Fox also drew 3.13 million viewers for Kansas State–Texas Tech at 3:30 p.m. ET, marking its largest college football audience of the season in that broadcast window. 

While ESPN made its College GameDay pregame show available to stream for free on its app and other platforms, Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff pregame show had its second-largest audience of the season, averaging 2.39 million viewers in its final hour.