While it’s far too early to make any sweeping conclusions about the 2023-24 college football season, the Week 1 results suggest that some things are more deserving of hype than others. If nothing else, the first batch of Nielsen numbers would seem to indicate that Coach Prime and Colorado might make good on all the preseason ballyhoo, while the near-term impact of the Charter-Disney feud may be somewhat overstated.
In his first Saturday at the helm of the Buffaloes, Deion Sanders coached his team to a 45-42 upset win over TCU, an effort that delivered a TV-high 7.26 million viewers in Fox’s primetime window. Having stress-tested the transfer portal with the addition of 68 new scholarship players, Sanders has rebuilt a 1-11 disaster into the sort of unit that exhausts superlatives.
If the performance by Sanders’ son, quarterback Shedeur Sanders, wasn’t enough to grab viewers by the throat—the Jackson State transfer threw for 510 yards and connected on four touchdown passes—two-way demon Travis Hunter’s 129 snaps as a wideout and cornerback were reminiscent of Charles Woodson’s bilateral exploits with Michigan during his Heisman year in 1997.
Fox also has dibs on Colorado’s next game, with the Buffaloes set to host Nebraska this weekend in the network’s Big Noon Saturday window. This marks the first time in the 122-year history of the program that Colorado will open with back-to-back national appearances; after taking on the Huskers, Sanders’ charges land in ESPN’s late-prime slot against Colorado State on Sept. 16.
Speaking of which, while the cable flagship’s weekend was relatively uneventful, ESPN’s broadcast sibling delivered big numbers with its Sunday night LSU-Florida State matchup. Per Nielsen, ABC drew the week’s largest TV audience, averaging 9.17 million viewers, good for a 21% boost compared to the year-ago Tigers-Seminoles outing in the very same window. The turnout for the SEC-ACC pairing was particularly encouraging, given No. 8 Florida State’s 45-24 throttling of fifth-ranked LSU.
More to the point, the deliveries flew in the face of the Disney carriage standoff, which has seen ABC affiliates go dark in Charter homes across New York, Los Angeles, Houston and San Francisco. All told, the ABC markets impacted by the distribution dustup are home to 16.8% of U.S. TV households.
While ABC seems to have weathered its first challenge of the new season, ESPN’s big test comes Saturday night when No. 11 Texas and No. 3 Alabama butt heads down in Bryant-Denny Stadium. When these two teams last met a year ago, 10.6 million fans tuned in to Fox’s noon window to see the Tide edge the Longhorns by a 33-yard field goal with 10 seconds left on the clock.
With 14.7 million Charter subs out of commission and a full slate of competing primetime games on the Big Four broadcast networks, ESPN will be hard-pressed to replicate Fox’s year-ago numbers. How the blackout will impact the final deliveries remains to be seen—both Austin and Tuscaloosa are Charter markets—but as ABC demonstrated last weekend, fans seem to find a way to watch their games, even when corporate interests complicate matters.
