6.347 Million Watch Georgia's Big Win Over the Gators
ATHENS - Georgia’s lopsided win over the Gators produced a huge audience for CBS - the No. 5 overall football game of the season.
More than 6,347,000 viewers saw the No. 7 Dawgs take out No. 9 Florida in Jacksonville. The game continues to be one of the strongest franchises in college football. It is no wonder CBS continues to pick the game each season before the start of the year.
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Georgia will get another crack at CBS’s 3:30 window this weekend as the No. 6 Dawgs take on No. 11 Kentucky (both teams are ranked in the top ten of the College Football Playoff’s rankings, which were released Tuesday night). It would be unlikely that UGA-UK would hit a number as high as the rivalry that is Georgia-Florida as it has only averaged 2.63 million viewers in the three rated games since 2013. UK-UGA has only been on CBS once in that time (2017).
MOST-WATCHED COLLEGE FOOTBALL GAMES OF 2018 SO FAR
1. Ohio St.-Penn St., ABC, 9.279M
2. Ohio St.-TCU, ABC, 7.328M
3. Notre Dame-Michigan, NBC, 7.091M
4. LSU-Miami, ABC, 6.553M
5. UGA-Florida, CBS, 6.347M
However, Georgia-Kentucky has much more going for it than in the past. The winner of the game will win the SEC East. Also, both teams are in the top ten of the College Football Playoff Rankings. Finally, CBS is using Georgia’s strong TV numbers to lead into the Alabama-LSU 8 PM kickoff - a game that should easily be the No. 1 game of the year in viewership by the end of the weekend. That game doesn’t need much help, but Georgia is about as good a lead into that game as CBS was going to get. Georgia, Auburn and LSU are the only three SEC schools to deliver multiple audiences of 5 million or more this season. Alabama has only done so once this year (Texas A&M).
The 6.347 million viewers for UGA-UF is the No. 10 all-time game the Bulldogs have played on TV, and it is the No. 7 overall regular season game Georgia has ever played on TV. It is the highest-viewed World’s Largest Cocktail Party on record. In fact, the 6.347 million viewers this season nearly doubled last year’s audience (3.380 million).
Nearly 37 million viewers have watched Georgia-Florida since 2013, making it one of the top college football TV games in the country behind only games like Ohio State-Michigan, Auburn-Alabama, LSU-Alabama and Army-Navy in that same time.