Throughout the 2025 college football season, the SEC has dominated the Big Ten in the ratings.

According to new data released by Nielsen, eight of the ten most-watched college football teams come from the SEC. Only Ohio State is in the top 10 for the Big Ten.

But on the field, the college football playoff rankings tell a different story. There are nine top-25 ranked SEC teams and seven in the Big Ten.

So why has the Big Ten been unable to keep up with the SEC in the ratings?

In August 2022, the Big Ten announced a new seven-year media rights agreement with Fox Sports, CBS Sports, and NBC Sports. The centerpiece of that deal is that each media rights partner has an over-the-air Big Ten college football window every week. FOX airs Big Noon, CBS airs at 3:30, and NBC airs a game in primetime. The deal is reportedly worth $7 billion.

Just two years earlier, the SEC announced a 10-year deal exclusively with ESPN. The SEC is guaranteed one game per week over the air on ABC. In practice, ABC almost always airs at least two SEC games, with many weeks featuring three. Despite being three years longer, the SEC deal is reportedly worth $4 billion less than the Big Ten deal.

As live sports have become increasingly valuable and college football viewership has exploded post-2022, live sports promoters have realized they have significant value in their TV rights. It is much easier to tap into this value if you split your rights among multiple platforms.

Credit: CBS

NASCAR did this by adding Prime Video and TNT Sports as media rights partners while continuing agreements with NBC and Fox Sports. Major League Baseball reportedly added NBC/Peacock and Netflix to the already split media partners of ESPN, Fox Sports, TNT Sports, and Apple TV+.

But what is good for revenue is not always good for viewership (just ask Major League Soccer). ABC, with three SEC games, allows viewers not to have to change the channel, tapping into the relative laziness of the American TV watcher.

The best way to quantify this laziness is the value of the lead-out program. As of 2025, the most-watched non-sports, news, or awards show is almost always the show that airs after the Super Bowl because people don’t change the channel. In recent years, the most-watched regular-season college basketball game has aired after an NFL game on Thanksgiving. In 2024, the most-watched National League Championship game, by far, was Game 1, which aired after an NFL doubleheader. The 2024 NLCS was a six-game series!

To see this in college football, take a look at Week 3 of this year’s season. In primetime, there were two big games: an unranked Florida team taking on then-No. 3 LSU on ABC and No. 16 Texas A&M taking on No. 8 Notre Dame on NBC. Despite Texas A&M–Notre Dame being a top-25 matchup and actually being a much better game, Florida–LSU averaged 2 million more viewers.

The reason is straightforward. Georgia–Tennessee, which aired before Florida–LSU on ABC, went into overtime. That game averaged 12.850 million viewers. Viewers simply decided there was no reason to switch the channel.

ABC is simply a better place to air your games than the piecemeal FOX/CBS/NBC setup the Big Ten has. These days, you are basically guaranteed to get three decent games on ABC. Viewers have no reason to change the channel as long as the games on ABC are relatively good.

While FOX has worked hard to build a brand for Big Noon, it has not found similar success in its mid-afternoon or primetime games. Those windows rarely feature top-10 teams and often instead feature unranked Big Ten or Big 12 teams — a far cry from the top-25 SEC teams on ABC.

But the situation is much worse for the Big Ten on CBS and NBC. The Big Ten was clearly banking on viewers being used to tuning into the top SEC game at 3:30 on CBS and doing the same for Big Ten games. But they just haven’t. CBS just isn’t the first place viewers think of when they want to watch college football. Outside of the Big Ten, CBS’s other over-the-air college football includes service academies and the tattered remnants of the Pac-12. Not exactly top-25 SEC games.

The situation is slightly better on NBC, but only slightly. NBC sometimes offers the Big Ten primetime games a decent lead-in with its Notre Dame games. But the Notre Dame games aren’t as consistent. NBC will air seven Notre Dame games this season, but only three are mid-afternoon lead-ins to the Big Ten. Of the three others, one was exclusive to Peacock, while the other two replaced the Big Ten in primetime. This inconsistent lead-in is not providing enough help to the Big Ten in primetime.

Syndication: The Columbus Dispatch

But the networks are not the only problem for the Big Ten. The top of the Big Ten just isn’t playing enough quality games. #1 Ohio State will likely only play two top-25 conference opponents in the regular season: Illinois (which is no longer ranked) and Michigan. It’s a similar story with #2 Indiana, which has already played Illinois and Oregon. Alabama, on the other hand, has already played four ranked opponents in the regular season (Georgia, Vanderbilt, Missouri, and Tennessee) and will likely play one more in Oklahoma. Oklahoma will also likely face five ranked opponents.

Taking a look at the top 10 most-watched regular-season college football games — eight of which involve at least one SEC team (only two involve one Big Ten team, and one of those was Ohio State–Texas) — only two don’t include two top-25 teams. Both times that didn’t happen, the unranked team beat a ranked team.

But unranked teams beating ranked teams are hard to come by in the Big Ten this season. Of the currently unranked Big Ten teams, six of the 11 teams have one or fewer conference wins. Of the currently eight unranked SEC teams, only three were not ranked in the top-25 at some point this season.

A top-heavy, too-large Big Ten has resulted in far too few top-25 games and far too many uncompetitive ones.

But it’s not clear that the Big Ten cares that they are losing the viewership war. Their teams get more over-the-air exposure per week than any other conference. This season, there have been as many as five over-the-air Big Ten games in a given week. Plus, their media rights are still incredibly lucrative. Despite losing viewership, the Big Ten will receive $3 billion more from its media rights partners than the SEC over the length of its deal.

With an uncertain future for traditional television, the Big Ten is perfectly fine with how they are doing here and now.