NBC's Miami-Notre Dame game averaged 9.1 million viewers Saturday and became the biggest audience in Week 10 across college football. It was NBC's top college football crowd of the season and the strongest Week 10 number on any network.
For a network that has spent years trying to turn Notre Dame into a reliable prime-time draw, the size of the audience mattered almost as much as the result on the field. Micah Gilbert scored a touchdown in the second half, and the game later peaked at 12 million viewers during the 11 PM ET quarter-hour, a late surge that pushed it past ABC's Alabama-LSU broadcast, which averaged 8.86 million.
The comparison matters because NBC is not counting viewers the same way every other network does. Its total combines Nielsen's linear audience with streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics, while other networks are cited on Nielsen-only figures. says the combined number is equivalent, but that makes direct ranking across broadcasts harder to read at a glance, especially in a week when ABC, CBS and all posted major numbers of their own.
Even so, the result is hard to dismiss. Alabama-LSU was the top Nielsen-measured audience of the weekend and reached 10.2 million at its peak, but NBC still finished with the day's largest average. CBS drew 5.40 million for Oregon-Ohio State, ABC averaged 4.41 million for BYU-Utah at Noon ET and 4.24 million for Georgia-Mississippi in primetime, while Kentucky-Tennessee on drew 3.06 million opposite Georgia-Mississippi. That spread shows how much the weekend's biggest audiences were no longer concentrated in one place.
The wider pattern has shifted from last season, when ABC or FOX delivered the top audience in every week. This year NBC has led at least twice and CBS once, a sign that the sport's biggest telecasts are moving around more often than they used to. Notre Dame has been a big part of that shift: only two NBC primetime games involving the program have averaged more viewers since 1991, the 2023 game against Ohio State at 10.6 million and the 2020 game against Clemson at 10.4 million.
The unresolved piece is how much of NBC's 9.1 million came from streaming and how much from linear television, because the network does not break out that split in the headline figure. What is clear is that Sunday morning's conversation starts with NBC, not the usual Saturday heavyweights, and with a Notre Dame game that gave the network its largest college football audience of the season.
