Atlanta was hungry for college football, as evidenced by the weekend TV ratings.
ESPN’s telecast of Georgia’s win over Vanderbilt on Saturday night drew an 11.2 rating in the Atlanta TV market, meaning about 262,200 local households tuned in on average.
To put that in perspective, here are the local TV ratings for two other sports events on TV at the same time Saturday night: The Braves-White Sox game had a 2.5 rating in the Atlanta market (an audience of about 58,500 homes), while the Atlanta United-Philadelphia game drew a 0.5 rating in Atlanta (11,700 homes).
Several other college football games on ABC scored big numbers with Atlanta viewers over the weekend. Saturday afternoon’s Alabama-Duke game in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff had a 9.1 rating in the Atlanta market, translating to an audience of about 213,100 homes. Saturday night’s Auburn-Oregon game had a 7.0 rating in Atlanta (163,900 homes watching). And Sunday night’s Houston-Oklahoma game drew a 6.2 rating here (145,200 homes).
Atlanta posted the highest rating among the nation’s 56 metered markets for the Georgia-Vanderbilt game, second highest (behind Birmingham) for Alabama-Duke and 10th highest for Auburn-Oregon (played at the same time as Georgia-Vanderbilt), according to Nielsen figures provided by ESPN/ABC.
The rating is the percentage of households in the market watching a game on average.
