• by Wayne Friedman , December 24, 2024

The first four games of the new expanded 12-team NCAA College Football Playoffs averaged 10.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

ESPN says the four-game collective viewing results were better than all the non-college football playoff games on New Year's Day 2024 (for the 2023 season), which averaged 8.4 million viewers.

The most-viewed game for this year's first round of the new expanded playoffs was Tennessee-Ohio State, averaging 14.3 million on ABC/ESPN on Saturday night.

By way of comparison, the game was the second-largest college football game of the 2024 season. Georgia-Texas SEC Championship took in 16.6 million viewers.

Second-highest viewing for the new college football playoff first round was for the Indiana-Notre Dame game (ESPN/ABC) on Friday night with 13.4 million viewers.

Two Saturday afternoon games on TNT came in much lower, with Clemson-Texas at 8.6 million and SMU-Penn State, 6.4 million. Those games aired against NFL Saturday games.

ABC/ESPN took in $38 million in national TV advertising sales for Friday and Saturday for the college football playoff-- $32 million for ABC and $7.2 million for ESPN/ESPN2, according to EDO Ad EnGage. TNT took in $2.7 million for those three days.

ABC took in 2.1 billion impressions from 397 advertiser airings. ESPN/ESPN2 accumulated 852 million impressions from 791 airings -- which include Sunday repeats of the games. TNT was at 180 million impressions and 433 advertiser airings.