College World Series final between Florida, LSU posts massive viewership numbers for ESPN

It probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but this year’s College World Series final matchup between SEC titans Florida and LSU did massive television numbers for ESPN.

The Game 3 broadcast on Monday was the top telecast of the day, broadcast or cable, getting 3.428 million viewers on ESPN. ESPNU added another 158,000 viewers to the total.

The three games spanning from Saturday to Monday saw an average viewership of 2.7 million viewers, which was the best for the College World Series final in over a decade, according to Austin Karp, the managing editor for Sports Business Journal.

Those numbers are made even more impressive by the fact that only one of the three games was close.

After the two teams played to a 4-3, 11th-inning LSU win on Saturday evening, a pair of blowouts followed.

Florida set all kinds of offensive records — including for most home runs in a CWS game and for most runs in a CWS game — in a 24-4 demolition of LSU on Sunday. LSU very much returned the favor on Monday night in the deciding game — setting their own record for most hits in a CWS game in the process — by winning 18-4 to claim the national title.

Fans couldn’t get enough of the action.

LSU, of course, is a massive driver if viewership interest when it comes to college baseball. The program had hordes of fans in Omaha throughout the event, all the way into the College World Series final.

Tigers fans shattered a record for the most Jell-O shots consumed at Rocco’s bar, with proceeds going to charity.

They also packed out Charles Schwab Field to the tune of thousands of fans in every game that LSU played in.

And the TV audience wasn’t limited solely to the College World Series final, either.

An elite pitching showdown between LSU ace Paul Skenes and Wake Forest ace Rhett Lowder in a winner-take-all game to advance to the College World Series final was also a massive success. More than 2.09 million viewers tuned into that one on ESPN2, making it the most watched pre-finals game on ESPN platforms ever.

The three meetings between LSU and Wake Forest, the nation’s top-ranked team, posted the top three pre-finals viewership numbers on record.

Needless to say, ESPN and its advertising partners were huge winners this year in a tremendously entertaining College World Series.