College football ratings seeing slide in 2026 amid off-field drama

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It seems as if everything regarding college football thus far in 2026 has been about what’s happening off the field. And now it seems as if it may be affecting the product on it.

In recent years, most sports have seen healthy increases in viewership. While that can largely be put down to Nielsen now measuring out-of-home viewing more comprehensively, football has seen arguably the biggest jumps. It helps that the NFL and college football are unquestionably the two most popular sports in the country.

But while college football has seemingly never been bigger in modern America, it’s been engulfed by conversations that are more existential and political in nature as opposed to who is going to win the national championship or the Heisman.

College football fans have been hit over the head with one transformational change after another. If it’s not the transfer portal and NIL and sponsorships taking over the sport, it’s the involvement of the federal government and College GameDay turning into C-Span with its one-sided advocacy of the Protect College Sports Act. Traditions and rivalry have fallen by the wayside as the SEC and Big Ten are in a Cold War type race to amass as much power and revenue as possible and the rest of the sport increasingly sees themselves on the outside looking in.

Is it possible that fans are now showing their apathy towards a product that is expanding its playoff and casting years of history to the side by not tuning in to the games?

According to David Rumsey at Front Office Sports, average viewership for college football games has seen an 11% decline so far in the 2026 season compared to last year. Each FBS game is averaging 1.7 million viewers through the first four weeks of the season, a backslide from the comparable stretch last season.

Part of the reasoning has been the lack of marquee matchups. Just two games have topped 10 million viewers thus far, Ohio State vs Texas and Ole Miss vs LSU. Compare that to last season when four games in Week 1 alone topped the 10 million mark with the Buckeyes and Longhorns leading the way. But we also had Notre Dame-Miami, Alabama-Florida State, and LSU-Clemson reaching those heights. Three of those games were rematches this year and all of them failed to reach the same heights as last year.

As a counterpoint, Fox’s data guru Michael Mulvihill shared that total college football viewership is slightly up this year thus far. However, that’s a product of more games being aired. Meanwhile, total NFL viewing is actually a tick down. He views that data as saying the sport is in a healthy place overall.

I’ve seen at least one story saying average CFB viewership is down -11%, and it is

But the number of games on national networks is up, so the higher volume negates the lower average viewership

To me total viewing time is the most correct way to look at a sport’s overall trend

— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) September 30, 2026

It will be interesting to see what the ratings do for the rest of the season when we get to conference play. But it’s a concerning sign for the sport, especially for marquee early-season matchups. If the College Football Playoff does indeed expand to 24 teams, the incentive to play big non-conference games may evaporate. If a team can go 10-2 every season while playing a bunch of G5 schools and automatically qualify, what’s the point of challenging yourselves in September? Is this trend going to get worse and everyone is going to start playing Indiana’s schedule?

One only has to look at the first month of the Big Ten schedule and ratings to see that the situation is getting fairly grim outside of a few elite programs. And the fact that multiple big non-conference games are getting canceled left and right isn’t a positive indication, either.

It’s definitely not time for college football to panic. But it’s understandable if fans might need a break after being inundated with so much change and chaos over the last few years. The secret formula for the sport has always been that every game matters. And while chasing the revenue of an expanded playoffs and constantly adding more may help the bottom line now, it may also take away at least part of what made the sport unique.

The post College football ratings seeing slide in 2026 amid off-field drama appeared first on Awful Announcing.

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