Alabama’s 45-40 victory over Clemson in the College Football Playoff championship game Monday night on ESPN drew an average of 25.7 million viewers, a 23 percent drop from the 33.4 million who watched last year, when Ohio State beat Oregon.
Alabama’s 45-40 victory over Clemson in the College Football Playoff championship game Monday night on ESPN drew an average of 25.7 million viewers, a 23 percent drop from the 33.4 million who watched last year, when Ohio State beat Oregon.
The smaller audience could have been because the title game was not the novelty it was last year, when it made its debut; because it was a matchup of two Southern teams; or because Clemson is not as well known to a national audience as Alabama or either of the teams that played last year.
Streaming of the title game on WatchESPN rose 38 percent from last year.
The fall in viewership for the title game came after the semifinals, which were played on New Year’s Eve, took an estimated 40 percent tumble in their audience.
The Alabama-Clemson game’s viewership fell to around (or below) the level of some of the Bowl Championship Series national championship games that preceded the creation of the Playoff. Alabama’s victory in the 2013 BCS title game attracted 26.4 million viewers, while its win over Louisiana State a year earlier was seen by 24.2 million. The Crimson Tide’s victory in 2010 had an average viewership of 30.8 million.
The Alabama-Clemson viewership was slightly higher than what ESPN drew for last Saturday’s NFL wild-card playoff game between Houston and Kansas City, which had an average of 25.2 million viewers. The other wild-card games drew much larger audiences, the highest being 38.8 million for Fox’s broadcast of the Green Bay-Washington game.
