Monday’s Rose Bowl game between Penn State and Utah drew a TV audience of 10.2 million viewers on ESPN, making it the least-watched Rose Bowl on record.
The game, played on Jan. 2 this year because Jan. 1 fell on Sunday, was down nearly 40 percent from last year’s Ohio State-Utah broadcast (16.6 million). The previous Rose Bowl low was 13.6 million for Stanford-Iowa in 2016.
The Rose Bowl was still the most-watched non-semifinal bowl of the season, eclipsing the Dec. 31 Alabama–Kansas State Sugar Bowl (9.1 million) and Dec. 30 Tennessee–Clemson Orange Bowl (8.7 million), both also on ESPN. Tulane’s dramatic 46-45 comeback win over USC in the Cotton Bowl, aired immediately before the Rose, drew just 4.2 million, the lowest of any New Year’s Six bowl since the current format began in 2014, and lower than this year’s Gator, Cheez-It and Alamo bowls, per ESPN.
However, thanks to garnering the highest semifinal viewership numbers in five years — 22.4 million for the Georgia-Ohio State Peach Bowl and 21.7 million for the TCU-Michigan Fiesta Bowl — ESPN’s entire New Year’s Six package averaged nearly 13 million viewers, its most-watched lineup in three years.
The Rose Bowl, which originated in 1902, was long the most-watched bowl annually prior to the inception of the BCS and, later, College Football Playoff. It regularly drew more than 20 million viewers throughout the 2000s and early 2010s — reaching as high as 35.6 million for the 2006 Texas-USC national championship game — but has been gradually trending downward since in years it does not host a semifinal.
Last month, the Tournament of Roses reluctantly signed off on an agreement to allow the College Football Playoff to expand to 12 teams in 2024-25. Bowl officials had been seeking assurance that the game would maintain its exclusive TV window at 2 p.m. PT on New Year’s Day when the CFP negotiates its next contract.
The Pasadena game will host a semifinal next season as part of the current CFP rotation, then is expected to host quarterfinals in the first two years of the new system.
How viewership tracking has changed since 2020
It’s important to note that Rose Bowl viewership, like all programming and especially live sports, prior to 2020 didn’t include out-of-home audiences, which is people watching at bars, restaurants, hotels, and viewing parties at other homes. That can add thousands or even millions of viewers to major sporting event audience measurements, meaning older Rose Bowls had bigger eyeball totals than the officials’ totals.
While the game was a new audience low, it still was No. 2 in cable’s key viewer demographics — the numbers brands want to see when paying for in-game TV advertising — after the Bills-Bengals “Monday Night Football” telecast that was notable for the terrible injury suffered by a Bills player that eventually ended the game early. Like everything else on television, the Rose Bowl also was played amid the ongoing cord-cutting trend that has siphoned more than 30 million U.S. households from the cable ecosystem over the past five years, with new streaming service subscriptions not making up the gap. Live sports remain the most resistant to the TV industry’s continued audience troubles but are not immune — although this game’s viewership numbers are shockingly low.
ESPN currently pays a reported $470 million annually to broadcast the College Football Playoff final, plus separate fees for the TV rights to the Rose, Orange, Cotton, and Sugar bowls that bring the yearly combined rights cost to more than $600 million. — Shea
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(Photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)