There have been a lot of eyeballs on the 2025 Oklahoma Sooners.
According to Nielsen, OU is the fifth-most watched team in the country through Week 9 of the 2025 college football season with 6.343 million viewers in eight games so far.
The rest of the All-SEC top 5 ahead of the Sooners included Alabama (7.910), Tennessee (7.804), Georgia (7.599) and Texas (6.882). After OU in the top 10 was LSU, Ohio State, Ole Miss, Florida and South Carolina.
Sooners' SEC move paying off in another way
Of the nine other teams on the list, OU has either already played or will play six of them. Tennessee, second on the list, will host the Sooners on Saturday for a top-20 matchup that earned the primetime slot on ABC. These numbers are clear why despite other big-time matchups on the docket, even in the SEC.
These numbers also reveal another reason behind the Sooners’ move from the SEC to the Big 12, which didn’t have any teams on the list and has a marquee matchup this weekend between Cincinnati and Utah that will be on ESPN at 9:15 p.m. CT, when most of America is getting ready for bed.
Fans watching a specific team from their couch doesn’t directly win football games, but it can definitely result in that now more than ever. Viewership and massive media deals make the world go around in today’s college football, and in a time with revenue sharing and loaded coaching contracts, programs need every dollar they can get to compete at a national level. In 2023-24, before OU and Texas even joined the SEC to drastically increase revenue, each conference member got about $52.6 million from revenue distribution.
And the rich will only get richer if the 6-2 Sooners continue to win and garner more attention.