Colorado-Colorado State fifth most-watched college football game in ESPN history

Colorado football and Deion Sanders continue to draw the nation’s attention and set television records.

Saturday night’s Rocky Mountain Showdown against Colorado State was the fifth most-watched college football game ever on ESPN, despite a 10 p.m. ET kick. With an average of 9.3 million viewers, the game broke the previous ESPN late prime window viewership high.

Even more eye-catching is peak viewership for the game came between 11-11:15 p.m., with 11.1 million viewers. The Colorado-Colorado State matchup was also the most-streamed regular season game of all time on ESPN.

According to SBJ’s John Ourand, at 2:15am E.T., the game still registered 8.230 million viewers – an audience that was more than 1 million viewers bigger than the peak audience of any other college football game this week.

Saturday night’s game had more viewers than every single 2022 bowl game outside of the College Football Playoff and the Rose Bowl. Just five regular season games did better last year: Michigan–Ohio State, Tennessee–Georgia, Alabama-Tennessee, Alabama-Texas and Notre Dame-Ohio State.

While Sanders and the 19th-ranked Buffaloes have jumped to a 3-0 start, they’ve also been drawing massive TV ratings. The biggest matchup to date comes this weekend, as Colorado visits No. 10 Oregon in Eugene.

A quarterback battle between Bo Nix and Shedeur Sanders, the game is slated for 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC. It could be another ratings win for ESPN and Disney, which has gone all in on Colorado. College GameDay, ESPN’s college football pregame show, went head-to-head with FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff show in Boulder this past weekend.

ESPN brought in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as its guest picker, who wore Sanders’ “Prime 21” sunglasses during his time on the show. According to Chase Fisher, Blenders Eyewear CEO, between 65,000 to 70,000 sunglasses and counting have been pre-ordered. The “Prime 21” shades sell for $67, the year Sanders was born (1967). He personally asked for them to be priced at that number, which was originally $69. Quick math says the company has made more than $4.5 million off the sunglasses from pre-orders.

This is a developing story and will be updated