I pulled all the tv viewership information I could find on Houston since Houston joined the Big 12. 2023 and 2024 are complete as to what is available, 2025 isn’t as complete. It is missing a couple games I think there is data somewhere for but I couldn’t find it. (I did it for BYU as well)
Only one Friday game this year which gives a very small sample size, however, that one game is third in viewership to Texas on Fox and TCU on Fox. Overall we averaged 663,000 views on Saturday, while that Friday game was at 729,000. If you remove the Texas game as an outlier we have 439,888.
Here it is as chunk a chunk of information not refined as much…
But Friday average over three years:
1,304,250
Average Saturday (excluding post season):
1,547,760
My takeaway for BYU is honestly that they they are a walking million views. Not much more generally, but a walking million. Their only Friday game that didn’t hit a million was on ESPN2 with 917,000, and funny enough, it was the only good game as BYU finished the year 11-2 and SMU was a playoff team. For BYU, they can throw crappy games on Friday night and still get a million views. Then they can gave bigger matchups otherwise on Saturday nights and get closer to 2 million.
Houston Colorado a couple years ago was kind of a marquee game I guess? But I think Houston Tech will be the first real marquee big 12 game on a Friday.
UH vs Texas Tech is a Saturday caliber matchup on Friday. I don’t know what the viewership will be, but there will be a lot less college football competition on at the same time, which leads me to believe if you are a college football fan, you will watch at least some of the game.
High School football is obviously HUGE in Texas. That’s the big concern with Friday games. However, I don’t think HS football is as popular around bigger cities. Rural Texans just don’t have much else to do so HS football games end up being places to also socialize with your neighbors and community.
Houstonians just aren’t attending HS games in hordes. So I’d say part of the calculated risk is that we’re NOT targeting a national or even a statewide audience, we’re just trying to bring in more Houstonians. We’ll also pull viewership from conferencemates that aren’t in HS Football country.
And if we keep increasing TV viewership, I think game attendance will continue going up as well. Of course, success helps (F.U.CDH)
Yeah, I’d argue success helps both tv numbers and attendance. A second year with double digit wins leading into 2027 would be great for viewership and season ticket sales
As I said above, I think winning brings viewership and byu is certainly catchable, even in 2023 with a bad ish team Friday ratings delivered for Houston
