National Football League Draws Big TV Audiences

Terry McLaurin (17) of the Washington Commanders pursues DaRon Bland (26) of the Dallas Cowboys after an interception.

Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images

It is not news that football is the most popular TV sport in the United States, by a lot. Even granting that, however, the previous week on the gridiron was a pretty remarkable one.

The NFL recorded its four biggest audiences of the regular season during Thanksgiving week, with three of those topping 30 million viewers. For good measure, the league also offered up its inaugural Black Friday matchup — albeit to a smaller audience on Amazon’s Prime Video — and the college football season produced its most watched contest as well.

On Nov. 20, Monday Night Football delivered 29 million viewers across ABC and ESPN platforms, the largest audience for the franchise since 1996. That game, a Super Bowl rematch between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, closed out week 11 of the NFL season with what was then the largest audience of the season to date.

The mark stood for all of three days, until it was eclipsed by both afternoon telecasts on Thanksgiving. The early matchup between the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions on Fox, drew 33.7 million viewers — the largest tune-in ever for the early Thanksgiving game — with the significant caveat that Nielsen ratings have only included out of home viewing for the past three years. On average, about a third of the audience for the three Thanksgiving NFL telecasts was out of home viewers as people gathered for the holiday. The usual out of home audience for an NFL game is more like 10 to 15 percent of the total.

In the late afternoon telecast on CBS, the Dallas Cowboys’ blowout of the Washington Commanders drew 41.76 million viewers — the second biggest audience for an NFL regular season game on record (again, with the note that out of home viewing wasn’t counted before 2020), behind the same Thanksgiving window a year ago (42.06 million). NBC’s primetime game between the San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks drew 24.78 million viewers on the network and 26.9 million including streaming and digital platforms, the best showing for the nightcap since 2015.

The league said the three games averaged a combined 34.1 million viewers across all platforms, the highest mark ever.

On Sunday, another Eagles game — this one against the Buffalo Bills — drew 30.9 million viewers on CBS, beating Monday Night Football for the top non-Thanksgiving audience of the NFL season and hitting a 16-year high for the late afternoon national broadcast.

Prime Video’s Black Friday game, the first such contest in league history, drew a comparatively light 9.61 million viewers, according to Nielsen. Still, the game — which also featured a host of ways for viewers to engage with Amazon’s main consumer business, online shopping — did what the tech giant hoped: “Prime Video’s first Black Friday football game welcomed meaningful successes across Amazon’s many touchpoints with fans and customers,” said Jay Marine vp and global head of sports for Prime Video. “We’re beyond proud of this new tentpole event we’ve created with the NFL.”

Saturday featured a host of rivalry games in college football, none bigger than Michigan’s win over Ohio State. Fox’s broadcast of the contest averaged 19.07 million viewers, the network’s biggest audience of a regular season college football game ever and the highest mark on any network since 2011. Four other games Saturday drew more than 5 million viewers, led by the 9.09 million for Alabama’s last-second win over Auburn on CBS.

2023-11-29 20:07:15
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