Bama-Ohio St. National Title Game Flops With Viewers

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With two major programs in the CFP National Championship Game, you would have expected a monster TV rating. It didn’t; in fact, the game failed to outproduce both semifinal games and wound up delivering an all-time low viewership for any college football title game since at least 1999.

Bama-Ohio St. drew a total of 18.65 million viewers, per Awful Announcing, down slightly from OSU-Clemson (19.15 mil) and Bama-ND (18.89 mil) in the semis and thoroughly from last season’s title LSU-Clemson title game (25.59 mil).

National Championship viewership since 1999 can be found here via Sports Media Watch. This year’s game is the only time less than 20 million viewers tuned it. You could assume more people would have caught on late or stuck around if the game was competitive, but ratings are down all over the sports landscape. Alabama won the game 52-24 over the Buckeyes.