Rivalries both new (Bills-Chiefs) and old (Cowboys-Eagles) both delivered multi-year viewership highs in Week 6 of the NFL season.
Sunday’s Bills-Chiefs NFL regular season game averaged a 13.2 rating and 25.41 million viewers on CBS, marking the largest Week 6 NFL audience since 2016 (mostly Cowboys-Packers: 28.01M), and the top Week 6 audience on CBS since 2007 (Patriots-Cowboys: 29.13M). Ratings increased 9% and viewership 7% from coverage featuring Cowboys-Patriots last year.
The Bills’ win delivered the third-largest audience of the NFL season, trailing only the Week 2 national window on CBS (mostly Cowboys-Bengals: 14.1, 27.39M) and the Week 3 national window on FOX (mostly Packers-Buccaneers: 13.4 26.40M). CBS owns three of the four largest audiences thus far (top ten chart below).
Largest audiences of NFL season through Week 6
Also hitting a multi-year high on Sunday, NBC’s Sunday Night Football (Cowboys-Eagles) scored an 11.0 and 20.79 million (22.3M including additional streaming data not tracked by Nielsen) — the highest rated and most-watched Week 6 edition of SNF since Chiefs-Patriots in 2018 (12.3, 21.11M). Including the additional streaming audience, it was the most-watched Week 6 edition since Patriots-Colts in 2015.
The Eagles’ win delivered a 30.7 rating and whopping 61 share in Philadelphia, meaning that 61% of televisions in use were tuned to the game in the average minute — a record for an Eagles game on SNF. Dallas was not far behind at a 28.0 and 59.
Shifting to the afternoon windows, the FOX singleheader (Jets-Packers in nearly half the country) averaged an 8.6 and 16.37 million and the CBS early window (mostly Ravens-Giants) pulled a 7.25 and 13.45 million — both up a modest amount from last year’s equivalent windows.
Finally, ESPN’s Monday Night Football (Broncos-Chargers) pulled a 6.7 and 12.05 million — down slightly from Bills-Titans last year (6.9, ~12.5M).
(Nielsen estimates from Showbuzz Daily 10.18, Programming Insider 10.18)
