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LSU-Clemson delivers big ratings for ESPN; top-10 cable audience of all time
By Dave Holcomb
Published:
LSU reached the pinnacle of the college football world Monday night, completing a 15-0 season and beating defending champion Clemson by 17 points. But ESPN scored big as well.
The ESPN MegaCast presentation of the national championship Monday brought in an initial audience of 25,588,000 viewers, which beat last year’s title game by 308,000 viewers. The LSU-Clemson showdown was also the biggest viewership audience for any cable program since the 2018 National Championship between Georgia and Alabama.
According to ESPN, the MegaCast audience peaked at 29.2 million around when LSU took the lead late in the second quarter.
ESPN’s MegaCast included numerous different ways to watch the game. About 25 million viewers tuned into the network’s primary telecast, which is a three percent increase from last season’s game.
This matchup had a bigger audience than all three of the recent Clemson-Alabama national championship games. After including the streaming viewers, ESPN projects the LSU-Clemson matchup will go down as the third-most watched College Football National Championship.
At the very least, the game joined the Top 10 list of the most-watched cable programs in history. College Football Playoff games account for eight of the 10 most-watched shows on that list.
Dave covers SEC football for Saturday Down South.
