There were A LOT of people watching Kentucky vs. Ole Miss

Kentucky had a golden opportunity to make a statement win over a Top 20 team. How big of an opportunity? There are numbers to quantify it.

For the second straight season, Kentucky hosted the first SEC game of the 2025 season at Kroger Field. Played in the 3:30 PM ET time slot on ABC, it was a magnet for casual college football viewers.

Kentucky-Ole Miss was the second-most-watched game of week two, drawing in 4.8 million viewers on ABC. That’s 500,000 more people than Big Noon Kickoff’s rivalry game between Iowa and Iowa State on FOX. Oklahoma and Michigan drew 9.7 million in the primetime window on ABC.

It’s been a banner year for ESPN and ABC. The broadcast network boasted its best two-week start to a college football season since 2006. They followed up a record-breaking audience for Lee Corso’s final College GameDay with their second-most-watched episode ever, with 3.3 million viewers in the final hour of the show.

The enormous ratings tell us two things. First and foremost, there are a portion of college football diehards that pretend to be disenfranchised from the sport because of the NIL and transfer portal changes. That’s not representative of the whole population. The sport is more popular now than ever before.

The second learning lesson is a tough one for Kentucky football fans. For the second straight year, Mark Stoops had a loaded guest list of recruits, playing on one of the biggest stages in the sport. How did they handle it? By giving the ABC broadcasters a chance to openly criticize them from the booth.

“We just chronicled Mark Stoops’ tenure, and for the most part, it’s been a very successful tenure. It’s turned south the last couple of years. But these are the kinds of things, if you’re on the hot seat, they’ll get you fired,” said Sean McDonough.

“It just does not look like a well-coached football team in terms of management and operation. They do a lot of things very well, they play great defense, they coach great defense, but the offense and the game management is an issue, at least recently.”

The Kentucky football program had a golden opportunity against Ole Miss and couldn’t make the most of it. It’s unlikely they’ll get another one of those this fall at Kroger Field.

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