TELEVISION VIEWERSHIP
Bowl Season Viewership is Strong
T
elevision viewership for Bowl Season was up across the board with an average of 4.7M viewers per broadcast with a total reach of almost 100 million.
VIEWERS PER BROADCAST
TOTAL REACH
4.7M 100M
• The New Year’s Six bowls and the CFP National Championship were up 16 percent combined over last year, notching an average of 14.2 million viewers across the seven games.
16%
• The CFP National Championship was up 19 percent vs. last year, with 22.6M viewers tuning in across ESPN networks. The matchup peaked with 25.4M viewers. • The 25 non-NY6 bowl games on ESPN’s primary channel averaged 2.4M viewers, up 24 percent from last year.
24%
• The 31 non-NY6 bowl games across ESPN networks averaged 2.6 million viewers, up 12 percent from last year’s smaller schedule of 18 bowl games due to COVID-19.
BROAD REACH: Bowl game TV broadcasts resulted in tens of millions of impressions for the Bowl Season brand.
• The average bowl game on ESPN drew 900K more viewers than the average regular season game on the network (2.6M vs. 1.7M). Compared to other sports, bowls also brought in over 1M more viewers than regular season NBA or MLB Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN. • The top non-NY6 bowl game on ESPN this year (Transperfect Music City Bowl) drew more viewers (5.6M) than any regular season CFB game on cable (LSU at Alabama). • Opening weekend (Dec. 17-20, 2021) averaged 1.8M viewers over the first nine games, an increase of 31% over 2019’s opening weekend.
20
BOWL SEASON
31%
2021-22 ANNUAL REPORT
MORE VIEWER S
Than An y Regular Season Game on Cable
