The Rose Bowl between Penn State and Utah had the lowest viewership in the history of the game

Monday’s Rose Bowl game Pennsylvania state And Utah It drew a television audience of 10.2 million viewers on ESPN, making it the lowest-watched Rose Bowl ever.

The game, which was held on Jan. 2 this year due to a fall on Jan. 1 on Sunday, is down about 40 percent from last year. Ohio StateUtah Radio (16.6 million). The previous Rose Bowl drop was 13.6 million LBP Stanford-Iowa in 2016.

The Rose Bowl was still the most watched semifinal of the season, surpassing December 31 Alabama–Kansas State Sugar Bowl (9.1 million), and Dec. 30 Tennessee–Clemson Orange Bowl (8.7 million), both of which are also on ESPN. Tulane’s dramatic 46-45 victory USC The Cotton Bowl, which aired right before the Rose, drew just 4.2 million, the lowest of any six-course New Year’s bowl since the current format began in 2014, and lower than this year’s Gator, Cheez-It, and Alamo bowls, according to for ESPN.

However, thanks to the highest viewing numbers for a semi-final in five years – 22.4 million at the Georgia-Ohio State Peach Bowl and 21.7 million at the TCU-Michigan Fiesta Bowl ESPN’s entire six-pack New Year’s Eve averaged nearly 13 million viewers, the most-watched lineup in three years.

The Rose Bowl, originating in 1902, has been the most watched bowl annually since long before the creation of the BCS and, later, the College Football Playoff. It regularly drew more than 20 million viewers throughout the 2000s and early 2000s—reaching 35.6 million for the 2006 Texas-USC National Championship—but has been gradually declining for years not hosting semifinals.

Last month, the Roses reluctantly signed an agreement to allow the College Football Playoff to expand to 12 teams in 2024-25. Bowl officials were seeking assurances that the game would retain its exclusive 2 p.m. PT TV window on New Year’s Day when CFP negotiated its next contract.

Pasadena will host the Quarterfinals next season as part of the CFP’s current rotation, and is then expected to host the Quarterfinals in the first two years of the new system.

How has view tracking changed since 2020

It’s important to note that Rose Bowl viewership, like all programming and especially live sports, prior to 2020 did not include out-of-home audiences, that is, people watching in bars, restaurants, hotels, and viewing parties at other homes. That could add thousands or even millions of viewers to the audience measurements for major sporting events, meaning that the older Rose Bowls had greater eyeball totals than the officials’ totals.

Despite its low level of new-game audience, it’s still second in the demographic of prime cable viewers—the numbers brands want to see when paying for in-game TV ads—behind the Bills-Bengals “Monday Night Football” telecast that It was notable for the terrible injury the Bills player had which ultimately ended the game early. Like everything else on TV, the Rose Bowl has also been played amid the ongoing cord-cutting trend that has taken more than 30 million American households out of the cable ecosystem over the past five years, with new streaming service subscriptions not closing the gap. Live sports remain the most resistant to the television industry’s ongoing audience problems but aren’t immune – even though viewership numbers for this game are shockingly low.

ESPN currently pays $470 million annually to broadcast the College Football Playoff Final, plus a separate fee for the television rights to the Rose, Orange, Cotton, and Sugar bowls that brings the annual combined rights cost to more than $600 million. – something

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(Photo: Kirby Lee/USA Today)