Kentucky was one of the Most-Watched College Football Teams in America

Kentucky QB Brock Vandagriff at Ole Miss, via Mont Dawson, KSR

The old saying from P.T. Barnum is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Let’s hope that applies to the Kentucky football team.

Sports Business journalist Joe Pompliano crunched the numbers and compiled a list of the most-watched college football teams in 2024. Using average viewership numbers, Georgia led the way at No. 1, ahead of many other college football brand names. Michigan and Ohio State were the only non-SEC schools in the Top 10, just a few spots ahead of Kentucky at No. 9.

That’s right, Kentucky drew an average of 4.5 million viewers per game in 2024. That’s nuts.

Most-Watched College Football Teams of the 2024 regular season📺

(via @JoePompliano) https://t.co/25Kvq9igoS pic.twitter.com/4nqbGvnVcF
— On3 (@On3sports) December 12, 2024

The Good News: A lot of people watched Kentucky play football in 2024.
The Bad News: A lot of people watched Kentucky lose football games in 2024.

It was the worst Kentucky football season in 11 years. The Wildcats won one SEC game and didn’t score 21 points against an SEC foe. Do you really want people to see that? No publicity is bad publicity, I guess.

Why Kentucky was one of the most-watched CFB teams

The other nine teams on that list had winning records and four are CFB Playoff teams. Why did so many people watch this Kentucky team?

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The 2024 football season was the first year of the SEC’s new deal with ESPN. Kentucky rarely made the cut for the 3:30 pm SEC on CBS game. In the old deal, ESPN also got to broadcast a few Big Ten games in premiere timeslots. In 2024, they went all-in on the SEC and that meant there were a few Saturdays with an SEC on ABC tripleheader.

Kentucky played the first SEC on ABC game of the season, hosting South Carolina in an ugly route at Kroger Field. The one-point loss to Georgia in primetime was the most-watched game of week 3, drawing an audience of 6.7 million in the one-point loss to the nation’s top-ranked team. There were 4 million people who watched Kentucky upset Ole Miss, the most-watched game of the noon window. The Wildcats also made a late-season appearance on ABC in the loss at Texas.

ESPN’s lucrative TV deal with the SEC is putting more money in the athletic budget and getting more eyeballs on the Kentucky football team, both of which are great long-term developments for the school.

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