The Bulldog victory over the Crimson Tide, televised on multiple sports networks but primarily watched on ESPN, drew 22.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen same-day ratings Monday.
That was higher than last year’s Alabama blowout over Ohio State, which brought in 18.6 million viewers. But it’s far below the 2020 LSU-Clemson game, which attracted 28.44 million.
Still, Monday’s game was the most-viewed non-NFL sporting event on any network in the last two years.
Relatively speaking, with streaming ascendant and options splintering, non-football TV programming seldom hits 10 million viewers nowadays, much less 20 million.
ESPN aired variants of the game across 13 ESPN-branded networks, dubbed the MegaCast, including sky-view cameras to split screens and more. The SEC Channel also aired the game but those ratings were not provided.
The local Atlanta ratings revealed more than 780,000 households watched the game out of 2.4 million entire households with TVs. Nearly all the viewers caught the game on the primary ESPN network, representing 60% of TVs that were actually on in metro Atlanta Monday evening. The household number equates to more than 1.2 million people.
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