People still go to games.
Rutgers was on the road so the home team accounted for the attendees in that game. It will be interesting to see what happens this week in Piscataway. Who shows up and what will their reaction be to the coach and the team; should be interesting.
Game day attendance is pretty good across the B1G. This past week, no host team had reported attendance lower than about 86% capacity, and that was in Minnesota against UCLA. It was, literally, a perfect Minnesota day: sunny and mid-40s.
I guess the Bruins brought their “don’t watch us in person” vibe with them from Cali. Probably the biggest shock was that six of eight home teams lost, including Michigan and Ohio State.
Watching the game from the comfort of your home
The Big Ten is doing “okay” on the tube. This week, though, TV viewership was dominated by the SEC. The B1G’s network had two, well, clunkers on, although Rutgers did hang tough with the Badgers for a half. Combined, the two BTN games barely drew more than a half million viewers.
The rest of the conference did, again, “okay”. The lowest draw on a major network was Penn State-Washington with less than a million viewers on FS1. That has to be disappointing to the B1G’s leadership, but not as disappointing as Matt Campbell has been leading the Lions.
Top ten viewed games
The top ten viewed games over the weekend, including the almost stand alone Nebraska-Illinois game on Friday, did not provide a good showing for the Big Ten. Five of the top viewed games were in the SEC, with only Ohio State’s beat down by Oregon breaking into the top five. And even there, there were an ACC and Big XII game in front of the two remaining Big Ten games.
This week, the Big Ten has seven of its nine games on major networks; only two BTN games (Michigan State-Washington and Rutgers-Nebraska) and none on Peacock. Indiana-USC is the big one at 3:30 on CBS along with Illinois at UCLA on Fox on Friday.
