Monday 1/9/12 – BCS Leads ESPN to #1, CBS Encores Beat Rest of Broadcast

Closing out the college football season, ESPN aired the BCS Championship Game (8.24 A18-49 Live Rtg), featuring No. 2 Alabama’s win over top-ranked LSU Monday night. Despite dropping 14% from last year’s national championship match-up between Auburn and Oregon, ESPN still led the night among A18-49, topping all of broadcast and cable.

Even with a full repeat line-up of its regularly-scheduled comedy block and Hawaii Five-O, CBS captured second place overall and a first place broadcast win with A18-49, beating out originals on ABC and NBC.

Ranking fourth overall behind Univision’s telenovelas Familia con Suerte (1.53), La Que No Podia Amar (1.88) and talk show Don Francisco Presenta (1.14), ABC’s two-hour The Bachelor (1.50) lost more than a third of its A18-49 audience from last year, while dropping 14% from its premiere last week. At 10pm, ABC's latest episode of Castle (1.81) grew 21% from its lead-in, while also improving from its last original on 12/5/11.

New episodes of Pawn Stars and American Pickers landed History in fifth place, while NBC’s combination of Who’s Still Standing (1.52), Fear Factor (2.02) and Rock Center with Brian William (0.71) fell behind the cable network with A18-49 viewers, with the latter dropping a hefty 35% from last week’s A18-49 performance.

Back-to-back repeat telecasts of House on FOX and encores of The CW's Gossip Girl and Hart of Dixie closed out the rest of the broadcast landscape.

Source: Nielsen, based on Live data.