A Super Bowl rematch delivered for FOX, even without all the methodological changes that have boosted sports viewing.
Sunday’s Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl rematch averaged 33.8 million viewers on FOX, easily topping Week 2 of the season and marking the largest Nielsen-measured television audience since the teams’ Super Bowl matchup in February. That figure, like all sports viewership figures since September 1, is per the Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” methodology.
The Eagles’ win set several viewership marks, including the largest Week 2 NFL audience on record, the largest September or October NFL audience on record, and the largest Sunday regular season audience ever on FOX. It should be noted that all of these records would still stand even if Nielsen had not shifted to “Big Data + Panel.” Using the panel-only metric that had been Nielsen currency prior to September 1, the game averaged 32.66 million, per Programming Insider.
Of course, even Nielsen’s panel-only viewership has undergone significant change this year, specifically the expansion of out-of-home viewing to include all television markets (up from two-thirds previously). The panel-only household rating — which lacks both “Big Data” and out-of-home viewing and thus provides the closest thing to an apples-to-apples comparison to past years — was 14.4, the highest for an NFL regular season window since Bills-Chiefs last November (15.1) and the tied as the highest for a Week 2 window in a decade.
FOX also averaged 20.72 million for the first half of its doubleheader (“Big Data + Panel”), the network’s largest early game audience since 1994. The full doubleheader averaged 26.88 million, making it the most-watched NFL doubleheader on record. Again, keep in mind the changes in Nielsen methodology over the past year.
As for the rest of Week 2, NBC averaged 21.5 million for Falcons-Vikings on “Sunday Night Football,” a figure that combines Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” and Adobe Analytics — marking the largest Week 2 “SNF” audience since 2016. The Nielsen panel-only figures were an 8.9 rating and 18.0 million viewers, per Programming Insider, actually down from Bears-Texans last year (9.4, 18.02M).
The first “Monday Night Football” doubleheader of the season averaged 13.5 million viewers, with Buccaneers-Texans averaging a combined 17.4 million across ABC and ESPN and Chargers-Raiders following with 9.7 million. The Buccaneers-Texans game had a panel-only audience of 16.2 million, per Programming Insider, compared to 15.00 million for Falcons-Eagles last season, which aired in the normal “MNF” timeslot but exclusively on cable.
Finally, CBS averaged a 6.9 and 15.0 million for its singleheader (“Big Data + Panel”) — down 24 and 20 percent respectively from a 9.1 and 18.8 million on FOX last year. The two high-coverage CBS games, Bills-Jets and Rams-Titans, were both blowouts.
