Key Takeaways
- Texas leads college football’s TV ratings through Week 8 of the 2026 season, averaging 8.344 million viewers ahead of Ohio State’s 7.460 million and Oklahoma’s 6.274 million.
- Quarterback Arch Manning, Peyton and Eli Manning’s nephew, has thrown for 1,507 yards, 12 touchdowns and seven interceptions across seven games while helping draw attention to the Longhorns.
- Nielsen’s rankings cover national broadcasts from Aug. 29 through Oct. 24; No. 11 Texas next faces unranked Mississippi State on Halloween.
The college football season is heading toward its final weeks, and Texas is officially drawing the biggest television audience this time around. The latest Nielsen ratings show the Longhorns averaging 8.344 million viewers through Week 8 of the 2026 season, putting them at No. 1.
Texas has been in the spotlight thanks to its quarterback with a big name, Arch Manning. What makes him stand out is that he's the nephew of famed NFL quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. During the past seven games with the Longhorns this season, Manning has passed for 1,507 yards, 12 touchdowns and seven interceptions. While his performance gets attention, it's obvious that his famous name draws interest, too.
But it's not just Texas drawing big viewership numbers. Looking at the rest of the tally, Ohio State ranks second with 7.460 million viewers, followed by Oklahoma at 6.274 million. Indiana sits fourth with 6.226 million viewers, narrowly ahead of Alabama, which averages 6.198 million.
Mississippi ranks sixth with 5.704 million viewers, while Georgia comes in seventh at 5.620 million. Michigan follows in eighth place with 5.402 million viewers. Tennessee ranks ninth, averaging 5.149 million viewers, and LSU rounds out the top 10 with 4.995 million.
The rankings cover the monitoring period from Aug. 29 through Oct. 24, 2026. The data comes from Nielsen's P2+ ratings, Live + SD, using its updated Big Data + Panel measurement system. Nielsen provided the college football viewership numbers to Complex in a new report released on Thursday, Oct. 29.
The figures include broadcasts on ABC, CBS, CW, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, FOX, FS1, NBC, NFL Network, TNT and USA. Partial telecasts and regionalized telecasts are excluded from the rankings.
Next up, the Texas Longhorns, ranked No. 11, go up against the unranked Mississippi State Bulldogs on Halloween.
Manning is playing in his fourth year of college football. This is also his second year as the starting quarterback for the Longhorns. He hasn't announced if he'll declare for the 2027 NFL draft yet.
