According to The Athletic, which pulled its TV ratings data from Sports Media Watch, the 22 Oklahoma regular-season games in 2018-19 averaged 3.76 million viewers on ABC, Fox, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU or FS1; the 18 Texas games on those channels averaged 3.2 million. The other 59 games that included the remaining eight Big 12 teams – and not OU or UT–averaged about 886,000 viewers.
“All of those schools in the SEC have the ‘University of’ in front of them – the University of Alabama, University of Georgia, University of Florida,” former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer told ESPN this week. “They all sit 100,000 people. It’s different from these church schools we have in our league.”