The Sugar Bowl was not ESPN’s least-watched College Football Playoff quarterfinal despite being postponed to Thursday afternoon.
The game drew an average of nearly 16 million viewers after kicking off at 4 p.m. ET on Jan. 2. The Sugar Bowl was originally set for 8:45 p.m. ET on New Year’s Day but was postponed following the terror attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans early Wednesday morning that killed at least 10 people and injured dozens of others.
Notre Dame beat Georgia 23-10 in the game to advance to the semifinals in the Orange Bowl against Penn State. The Nittany Lions beat Boise State 31-14 in the Fiesta Bowl.
The most-watched quarterfinal was, unsurprisingly, the Rose Bowl, despite the blowout. Ohio State was up 31-0 in the second quarter during its 41-21 win over Oregon. Over 21 million watched that game. Texas’ Peach Bowl win over Arizona State drew an average audience of 17.3 million and had over 23 million viewers at one point as the Longhorns needed double overtime to beat the Sun Devils.
The Fiesta Bowl was played on New Year’s Eve and drew an average audience of 13.9 million viewers. It’s yet another data point that New Year’s Eve is not the best time for the College Football Playoff to host a game if it wants a big audience.
The CFP insisted on having semifinal games on New Year’s Eve during many of the 10 years of the four-team playoff. And, predictably, those games typically drew smaller audiences than the games that were played on New Year’s Day.
In the 2019 season, the semifinals were played on Dec. 28. The Peach Bowl between LSU and Oklahoma drew 17.2 million viewers and the Fiesta Bowl between Clemson and Ohio State had 21.2 million viewers. In 2020, the New Year’s Day semifinals each averaged approximately 19 million viewers.
At the end of the 2021 season, the New Year’s Even games each averaged less than 17.2 million viewers. In 2022, ratings did spike on New Year’s Eve thanks to phenomenal games, as 21.7 million people watched TCU upset Michigan and nearly 22.5 million watched Georgia beat Ohio State as the clock hit midnight on the East Coast.
The playoff seems committed to hosting quarterfinal games on New Year’s Day for the foreseeable future, however. Even as it could expand to 14 teams as soon as the 2026 season. Both the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl want to stay as New Year’s Day games, and unless four playoff games would be played on New Year’s Day (unlikely) or games are pushed to Jan. 2 on a regular basis, it seems likely a New Year’s Eve quarterfinal will continue to happen even though more people typically watch college football on any other day.
