Ratings show Nebraska football fans should expect repeated Friday games

Other than the Black Friday game against Iowa, Nebraska football fans are not fond of playing games on any other day than the traditional Saturday. Unfortunately, it seems likely that in the wake of the game against Illinois, the Huskers will be voluntold to play more Friday night games in the future.

The why this is likely the case isn’t a mystery. It’s all about ratings and viewership and interest. And for better or worse, the Huskers draw a ton of eyeballs. They’re routinely one of the top rated games of the week. That includes even if they play on Friday night.

FOX Sports said earlier this week that the season's second iteration of "FOX College Football Friday" was the most-watched telecast of the day on any network. The top-25 matchup of unbeaten teams topped out at over 4.2 million viewers overall.

FOX also made it clear this wasn’t a situation where fans were just looking for football, either. It was that the Huskers were involved as well as who they were playing and the fact that it was a showdown of ranked teams. All of that meant that viewers were up 2.58 million over Arizona-Kansas State the previous Friday night. Most impressively, the ratings were 109 percent better than what Fox averaged for primetime Saturday college football in 2023.

Nebraska football cursed itself

All of this feels like it just means that the Cornhuskers have locked themselves into more appearances on Friday night in coming seasons. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the ratings for the Huskers do carry positives. Plenty of people got to see a Nebraska football team that is improving.That’s certainly not a negative recruiting wise. Though, whenever next time happens, we have to hope the defense looks quite a bit better.