Massive Audience Watches No. 1 Georgia Bulldogs Take out No. 11 Kentucky Wildcats
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ATHENS - The No. 1 Georgia Bulldogs’ 30-13 win over the No. 11 Kentucky Wildcats drew a massive audience for CBS - nearly doubling the second most-viewed college football game of the weekend.
In fact, Georgia’s win over Kentucky was watched by more people than Oklahoma’s wild win over Texas the week before. Georgia-Kentucky, a game that’s played every season, but is not considered a rivalry or a major TV property, got more viewers than power games like: Georgia-Auburn, Penn State-Wisconsin, Notre Dame-Wisconsin, Texas A&M-Arkansas, Auburn-LSU, Texas-Arkansas, Florida-LSU and Florida-Tennessee.
It isn’t surprising the Bulldogs won the weekend, but the total number of viewers, 6,369,000, is indicative of just how impressive the Bulldogs have been for their TV partners this season. The No. 2 game of the weekend, Alabama-State, didn’t come close to UGA-UK at 3.5M.
UGA coach Kirby Smart said it is important to have a good showing while so many are watching.
“Our fans and stadium are on display at home when we play in front of an audience like that. So much of today's kids care about perception, followers, viewers, and the marketability they have in the NIL world,” Smart said Tuesday.
CBS said the UGA-UK game over the weekend was the most-watched game in that series’ history on record (which goes back to 1997).
This is the second time this season that the Bulldogs had the largest TV audience for a college football weekend. Georgia has the largest audience on broadcast (Georgia-Clemson; 8.9M) and cable (Georgia-Arkansas; 3.8M) television this season. The Bulldogs now have the No. 1, No. 8 and No. 17 game of the college football season. Only Alabama and Wisconsin also have three TV games in the top 20 of this season so far.
And the Bulldogs are certainly the star of their broadcasts. Georgia’s game with Clemson stands as having four times the audience of any other game the Tigers have played this season. The audience for Georgia’s game with Kentucky more than doubled any other game Kentucky has played this season - and the Cats have played both LSU and the Gators. The same could be said for Carolina, which has played only one game this season that had with more than a million viewers - and it pulled in 2.5M.
Only Auburn and Arkansas, with games against TV power Penn State on ABC in primetime and Texas A&M on broadcast with the reach of CBS, had bigger audiences than when they played Georgia in the afternoon and on cable respectively.
Since 2016 Georgia has played 52 games that have had at least one million viewers. Saturday’s game with the Cats is the 15th most-watched game for the Dawgs since 2016.
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