College Football on TV: USC vs. Texas

For the second time in this young college football season, the University of Texas got the chance to play in prime time in front of a national TV audience, and for the second time, a national audience got to see the Longhorns handed a defeat. This week's game between Texas and California was not exactly a marquee match-up, and that's probably why, in the ratings competition between the weekend's two prime-time network-broadcast games, the other one - Stanford vs. USC - came out on top.

The Stanford-USC game had a lot going for it. USC came into the game ranked number 6, and the match up between the two West Coast rivals is perennially a tough battle that has important ramifications not just in the Pac 12, but in the national championship picture, too. All of that was enough to make 2.7 million total viewers tune in to the game on ABC to see what happened. What happened was that Stanford handily upset the Trojans.

The Cal-Texas game, in which Texas lost a close one, was relatively low-profile in comparison, and its broadcast on Fox lost by a similar slim margin, with 2.2 million total viewers. It was the second time that Texas was beaten in prime time on the field and in the ratings; the first time was back in week one, when the Texas-Notre Dame match-up was beaten by the Alabama-Wisconsin game.