The start to the NFL season led weekend overnight ratings for sports telecasts. ESPN’s Notre Dame-Michigan earned a 5.6 overnight on Saturday night, leading all weekend college football games. That rating is up from a 4.8 overnight for the same matchup in ’11. Last year’s game aired on NBC. ESPN also earned a 4.8 overnight for South Carolina-Georgia in the 4:30pm ET window and a 3.7 overnight for Florida-Miami at 12:00pm. Fox had its first college football game of the season with West Virginia-Oklahoma on Saturday night. The telecast earned a 1.9 overnight, up from a 1.4 rating for USC-Hawaii in Week 1 last season. FS1’s top game of the weekend was a 0.7 overnight for Washington State’s upset of USC. Meanwhile, ABC earned a 2.9 overnight for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Federated Auto Parts 400 from Richmond Int’l Raceway, which was the last race leading into the Chase for the Sprint Cup. That figure is compared to the same race last year, which had multiple rain delays and ended at 1:45am.
The chart below lists overnight Nielsen ratings from weekend sports telecasts.
