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College Football TV Ratings: Ohio State vs. Michigan becomes most-watched game of 2025 season

ns_headshot_2024-clearby: Nick Schultz13 hours agoNickSchultz_7

In Week 14, Ohio State defeated Michigan in The Game for the first time in nearly 2,200 days. It also brought in huge TV ratings for FOX to cap off the college football regular season.

Saturday’s game averaged 18.424 million viewers, FOX announced, making it the most-watched game of the year. It tops the previous most-watched game, which saw Ohio State take down Texas in Week 1 in front of an average of 16.6 million people. It’s also FOX’s second most-watched regular season college football game behind the 2023 edition of “The Game.”

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Michigan vs. Ohio State peaked at 20.5 million viewers between 3:30-3:45 p.m. ET, FOX said. It also marks a 49% increase from last season’s rivalry game.

For reference, last year’s edition of “The Game” drew 12.4 million viewers as Michigan got its fourth straight win over Ohio State. That was a steep decrease from the 19.06 million who watched in 2023 and the 17.14 million viewers in 2022.

It wasn’t necessarily easy for Ohio State to start last week’s game. Michigan started things off with a field goal and Sayin threw an interception, which set up another Wolverines attempt to go up 6-0. The Buckeyes added one of their own to make it a 6-3 game after one quarter.

Then, Ohio State broke out. Jeremiah Smith hauled in a 35-yard touchdown pass from Sayin to go up 10-6, and after another Michigan field goal, Brandon Inniss found the end zone just before halftime to extend the lead to 17-6.

The Buckeyes never looked back. Carnell Tate got in on the action with a 50-yard touchdown reception from Sayin to make it a 24-9 ballgame, and a Jayden Fielding field goal capped off a 20-play, 81-yard drive that churned 11:56 of game clock. That felt like the dagger for Ohio State, and the Buckeyes eventually drained enough clock in the fourth quarter to seal it.

It was quite the performance from Ohio State, which took down Michigan for the first time since 2019. During his postgame press conference, Ryan Day acknowledged how much the victory meant, but gave full credit to the players for achieving the program’s “No. 1 goal.”

“It’ll be a great memory of mine just being in there with those guys and enjoying the win and seeing them smile and knowing what they just did on the field,” Day said. “I’ll leave what we said in the locker room until Bill [Rabinowitz] writes another book and tells the story on this one. But just happy for our guys just to see the smiles on their faces and see the sense of accomplishment.

“The fact that we were gonna play in this game really, really hard for the love of our brother, not for the hatred of our opponent. That wasn’t what it was about that that’s what they did on the field today.”