Look at this shit
“Saturday's Colorado State-Colorado college football game averaged a 4.9 rating and 9.30 million viewers on ESPN, the network's fifth-largest regular season college football audience on record.”
Colorado-CSU tops nine million mark despite late start, later finish
Jon Lewis
If there was any remaining doubt about the impact Deion Sanders has had on the Colorado Buffaloes’ popularity, a late night game on cable against Colorado State topped nine million viewers.
Saturday’s Colorado State-Colorado college football game averaged a 4.9 rating and 9.30 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest late night college football audience on record and the fifth-largest regular season audience ever on the ESPN family of networks.
Colorado’s double-overtime win, which peaked with 11.1 million viewers from 11-11:15 PM ET, also delivered the largest college football audience of the season. The previous high was 9.17 million for FSU-LSU on ABC on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend.
Colorado has now played in three of the five most-watched games this season, with their week two matchup against Nebraska ranking fourth (8.73M) and their season opener against TCU placing fifth (7.26M). The only non-Colorado games in the top five are the aforementioned FSU-LSU in week one and Texas-Alabama on ESPN in week two (8.76M).
The most-watched Colorado game last season was their opener against TCU, a Friday night game that averaged 1.25 million on ESPN. The last time Colorado and Colorado State played on Nielsen-rated television, a Friday night game in week one of the 2019 season, their matchup averaged 1.28 million on ESPN.
Other than last year’s Winter Olympics Super Bowl lead-out (21.28M), no late night sporting event has averaged a larger audience since 2019 — when Broncos-Raiders averaged 10.6 million in the back half of a Week 1 NFL Monday Night Footballdoubleheader.
By comparison, the top late night NBA playoff game on record was this year’s Warriors-Lakers Game 6 on ESPN, which averaged 8.64 million viewers. The top late night Major League Baseball playoff game — a weather-delayed Padres-Braves NLCS Game 1 in 1998 — averaged 8.33 million on FOX.