National title game payout for Alabama, Georgia revealed

Kirby Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs defeated Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide in Monday night’s national championship game, ending a program drought that dated back to 1980. But financially speaking, both programs did quite alright for making it that far in the first place.

According to Front Office Sports, both Georgia and Alabama will receive $4.2 million per university for playing in the national title game alone. Collectively — for making it to both the College Football Playoff semifinals and the national championship — Georgia and Alabama will take home $6 million apiece, courtesy of the SEC. Front Office Sports added that the SEC will pay over two-thirds of the money.

But Georgia and Alabama weren’t the only ones to get paid after the national title game. Perhaps the biggest winner of them all was Kirby Smart, who received a heaping $200,000 for winning the College Football Playoff national championship. Smart will end the season with $850,000 in on-field bonuses. To put that number in perspective, the Bulldogs’ head coach has picked up a little more than $3.03 million in bonuses over the last five seasons combined.

After defeating Michigan in the Orange Bowl, Smart pocketed his first major bonus of $250,000, which took his bonus pool to roughly $650,000 after checking other boxes like making it to the SEC Championship, being selected for the College Football Playoff and winning SEC Coach of the Year.

Payout is high, viewership is low for Alabama-Georgia national title

Kirby Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs proved on Monday night that defense really does win championships. However, in the process, they proved that defense does not win viewers.

The national championship game was a rematch of the 2021 SEC Championship, perhaps turning some viewers’ attention away from the contest itself. And the fact that Alabama went into the locker room at halftime leading the Georgia Bulldogs by a meager 9-6 score — all 15 points of which were scored via field goals — couldn’t have helped retain viewers.

The television viewership numbers for the national championship game were low, as Georgia and Alabama averaged 22.6 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU. That figure was enough for ESPN to bounce back from a record-low in last year’s national title game; however, that Alabama-Ohio State matchup likely scored such low viewership totals because it came at the end of a COVID-impacted, largely attendance-less season.

Alabama and Georgia’s 22.6 million viewers made for ESPN’s second-lowest national championship game since the inception of the College Football Playoff in 2015, beating only the COVID-19 season. Excluding that Alabama-Ohio State game, this year’s national championship game made for the least-watched title game since 2005, when USC beat Oklahoma.