• by Wayne Friedman , January 12, 2016

ESPN’s college football championship game on Monday night witnessed a smaller decline versus its two semifinal games on New Year’s Eve when compared to last year’s games.

The close game in which Alabama topped Clemson in the final minutes, 45-40, posted a Nielsen live program-plus-same day metric of just over 25.7 million viewers -- a 23% drop versus the same game a year ago.

Last year’s game -- more of a blowout in which Ohio State beat Oregon -- posted 33.4 million viewers.

ESPN took much criticism when it came to its two semifinal college football games. Each lost a massive 36% of their respective audiences, due to a major time period change contracted by the College Football Playoff deal with the network.

The timing of the semifinal games this year moved to prime-time New Year’s Eve from a daytime/afternoon New Year’s Day time period. Each of the two highly touted college football semifinal games earned around 18 million viewers, down from about 28 million each a year ago.

According to reports, ESPN needed to make $20 million in makegoods to TV advertisers for the semifinal games. Typically, sports TV advertisers do not get makegood inventory from TV networks.

An ESPN spokeswoman said the network doesn't discuss specifics of its ad deals.

Competing with the football game, top shows on the broadcast networks on Monday included CBS reruns of “Big Bang Theory,” 8.9 million at 8 p.m. and 8.3 million at 8:30 p.m. CBS’ “Scorpion” was at 7.4 million; and ABC’s first hour of “The Bachelor” at 8 p.m., posted 7.1 million.