More does not mean more.
The ratings are in from the CFP national championship game in the first year of the expanded playoff, and they show a 12 percent decline from last year. Overall, the game drew 22.1 million viewers on Monday across ESPN/ESPN2/ESPNU. That’s a marked decline from the 25 million who tuned in to watch Michigan and Washington in last year’s championship game, the final year of the four-team playoff.
As Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp notes, “The audience is well above Ohio State’s last appearance in the CFP title game in 2021, when Alabama beat the Buckeyes 52-24 for an audience of just 18.7 million (that was the end of the COVID-impacted season). When Notre Dame last appeared in a title game in January 2013 (BCS era), Bama’s 42-14 dismantling of the Irish drew 26.4 million viewers on ESPN.”
The Ohio State-Notre Dame game did have some competition. It fell on Inauguration Day and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Still, Ohio State and Notre Dame are two of the most popular and iconic college football programs in the game’s history, and one would suspect they would fetch better numbers than Michigan and Washington.
The relatively poor rating raises questions about whether the expanded playoffs have led to decreased interest. The expanded college championship gave viewers five straight days of postseason action from Thursday, January 9, to Monday, January 13. That kind of saturation may have worn viewers out.
In any event, these numbers may give pause to those seeking to expand the size of the college football playoff.
