B1G Attendance: Lots of people showing up, including at Rutgers

Homecoming is usually a good day at and for a school. Alums return to renew friendships and acquaintances, good fellowship abounds. Generally an all around good time.

And, apparently, Rutgers still has that at Homecoming….at least pregame.

The crowd wasn’t bad either, if you can believe the announced attendance of 48,650, a number that several readers said seemed not far off. Even if a lot of them were wearing crimson and cream, not scarlet.

Rutgers, though, was not the smallest crowd in the Big Ten; that belonged to Northwestern, as it opened its “most expensive college stadium” with a full house of “just” 35,000. And apparently it was everything they wanted it to be: loud, luxe, and a landslide victory for the Cats (sorry, I needed another L word).

There were eight games played in the Big Ten last weekend with six reporting capacity or more. They were topped by Wisconsin’s reported 102.65% capacity and Minnesota’s juuuust over capacity count. And don’t you want to shout Ski-U-Mah for the Gopher’s win over Michigan?

USC continues to confound me; but then no, when people from the SoCal region say it just isn’t a draw. The Trojans still drew 59, 136 to a building that holds (for football) 77,500. In four home games this season, they have yet to fill the place.

This coming week, there are a couple of notable clashes in conference. Indiana plays at Nebraska (Fox – Big Noon) while USC is at Penn State Saturday night. PSU has already caught flak for not filling the place up. This coming week, in a nationally televised game (NBC, Peacock), it should be interesting to see what the crowd is.

TV Viewership in Week 5

The general feeling about college football – at least to start 2026 – was that attendance was down some and TV viewership was down some. But, The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel put it into some perspective. The games have, in large part, not been very good, and at least part of the problem is that there aren’t a lot of great non-conference matchups as teams try to pad resumes with payout games (see UMass, Howard). Mandel’s point:

Since the start of the College Football Playoff in 2014 (and not counting the 2020 season), there have been an average of 8.5 nonconference regular-season games between ranked opponents per season. Just last year, the number was nine.

So far in 2026, there have been two: Louisville-Ole Miss and Ohio State-Texas in Week 2.

Translate that to eyeballs on TVs and you get this, again from Mandel, too:

It’s no coincidence that average viewership through four weeks was down 11 percent year-over-year, according to Front Office Sports. Mass numbers still tune in for a big nonconference game like Ohio State-Texas, which drew the largest Week 2 audience on record with 14 million viewers. There just haven’t been nearly enough of them.

Only that game and LSU-Ole Miss (a conference game) have topped 10 million viewers. Last season, there were four such games in Week 1 alone (Texas-Ohio State, Notre Dame-Miami, Alabama-Florida State and LSU-Clemson).

A point to consider, and this is documented in ratings, the SEC has been the big draw, with the B1G coming in second. For what it’s worth, both the SEC and ACC don’t have their own network games (both through ESPN) rated by Neilson; BTN does.

The most watched games of Week 5? The top five spread the wealth among the Big Ten, SEC, and ACC.

• Ohio State vs. Iowa

• • 3:30 p.m. ET, CBS
  • Viewers: 5.97 million

• Alabama vs. Mississippi State

• • 12 p.m. ET, ABC
  • Viewers: 5.08 million

• Miami vs. Clemson

• • 7:30 p.m. ET, ABC
  • Viewers: 4.63 million

• Florida vs. Missouri

• • 3:30 p.m. ET, ABC
  • Viewers: 4.44 million

• Michigan vs. Minnesota

• • 12 p.m. ET, FOX
  • Viewers: 4.06 million

The Big Ten had good numbers for its major network game. Once you got onto “cable” or secondary channels, there was a pretty strong drop off starting with the Maryland-Nebraska game. That game drew 1.7 million fewer viewers than the national game on NBC at night. The three games on BTN drew numbers somewhat in line, though a bit lower, with other BTN games this season. Ohio State-Ball State early on saw well over a million viewers; that is not the norm.