re: Most watched college football games ever

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Had it been a good game I'm sure the Alabama-Notre Dame game from 2013 would have made the list. As it stands, however, Alabama scored with ease on its first three drives to take a 21-0 lead at the start of the second quarter.

Alabama was already a heavy favorite going into the game. When it was 28-0 at the half, the vast majority of people turned the game off.

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Hmm. I'm not clear on the technical details of how they collate and establish ratings. Do they require a viewer to be tuned in the entire game? Is there a threshold or percentage of the running time where a household is counted? One assumes they must have some sort of fairly detailed guidelines because better/worse ratings = more/less money they can demand from advertisers. So if a viewer changed the channel at half-time, the networks care what they changed the channel to, which means they also care that the viewer was watching 2 hours of the game even if the viewer changed the channel before the end.

Any media types out there who can lend some insight?