College Football Playoff viewership numbers don't tell the full story

While the College Football Playoff is meant to crown a National Champion, more than anything it's a television product. There's a reason that there's weekly rankings reveals and a reason that the networks will spend millions of dollars to broadcast the games which helps programs in a revenue sharing era pay the players.

When a team is ranked higher than everyone thinks such as Alabama, everyone points to the fact that there's "SEC Bias" or that the committee is picking a popular program. The counter to that point would be the fact that a school like Notre Dame with a massive fanbase was left out for Miami who's still a big program, but wouldn't outdraw Notre Dame.

CFP First Round viewership doesn't tell the full story

The First Round of the College Football Playoff is in the books, and the viewership numbers for the first round were released.

Everyone will point to the fact that the two games with Group of 5 programs drew far less of an audience than the games with only Power 4 programs and say that it's another reason to keep them out. The numbers however don't tell the full story of why each game fared as well as it did.

For starters, ESPN and ABC clearly didn't want to compete with the NFL and they sold off half of their inventory of games to TNT and it's partners. Not competing against the NFL proved to be wise as the games that went head-to-head with the NFL were demolished to no ones surprise.

Is it possible that Alabama Vs Oklahoma could've outdrawn one of the NFL games? It probably could've with two of the biggest programs facing off in what everyone expected to be the closest clash of the week.

College Football ended up getting lucky as the Washington Commanders are one of the worst teams in the league this season with Jayden Daniels otherwise the Eagles Vs Commanders would've drawn a much bigger audience. When you look at the numbers for the Bears Vs Packers game, it shows how much a good matchup between divisional rivals and Playoff teams will fare.

It's clear that having two Group of 5 programs isn't the real reason behind the stark difference in viewership between the College Football Playoff games. The NFL is always going to be king, and the only solution for College Football is picking it's spots like it did and trying to find the best windows to avoid NFL games.