The NFL Thanksgiving Day games delivered as expected, officially ranking as the league’s two most-watched regular season games on record.
Last Thursday’s Chiefs-Cowboys NFL Thanksgiving Day game averaged a 15.1 rating and 57.23 million viewers on CBS, marking the largest NFL regular season audience on record and an increase of 35 and 47 percent respectively over Giants-Cowboys on FOX last year (11.2, 38.84M).
The Cowboys’ win, which peaked with more than 61 million viewers in the final quarter-hour, delivered the third-largest television audience of the year behind the Super Bowl in February (127.7M) and the Bills-Chiefs AFC Championship on CBS in January (57.7M).
Keep in mind that Nielsen did not begin tracking out-of-home viewing its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100 percent of markets until February of this year, meaning that prior year figures — all the way up through the aforementioned Bills-Chiefs AFC title game — include less out-of-home viewing (if any at all).
Nielsen also shifted to a new “Big Data + Panel” metric in September that combines data from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel. While that generally results in larger audiences, there is precedent for viewership being lower under “Big Data + Panel” than the prior panel-only metric. The out-of-home change is far more likely to have driven the viewership record than the shift to “Big Data + Panel.”
But while the Nielsen changes are almost certainly the reason viewership hit an all-time high, there is no question that the game was a bigger-than-normal draw. The 15.1 household rating — which by definition does not include out-of-home viewing — is the highest for a Thanksgiving NFL game since Dolphins-Cowboys on CBS in 1999 (16.1).
Earlier in the day, FOX averaged a 13.4 and 47.67 million for Packers-Lions, ranking as the second-largest NFL regular season audience on record. The Packers’ win, which peaked with 57.96 million in the 4 PM ET quarter-hour, increased 7% and 28% respecrtively from Bears-Lions on CBS last year (12.5, 37.38M).
Prior to this year, the record for a regular season NFL game was 42.06 million for Giants-Cowboys on Thanksgiving 2022. Prior to the out-of-home viewing era, the record was 41.6 million for a 1990 Giants-49ers “Monday Night Football” game on ABC.
Beyond the quality of the matchups and the methodological changes, keep in mind that the schedule was slightly different for this year’s Thanksgiving games. The afternoon games both began about a half-hour later than in past years, with the 1 and 4:30 PM ET start times in line with the usual Sunday schedule (as opposed to the slightly earlier 12:30 and 4 PM ET starts that may well have thrown off viewers in past years).
Rounding out the Thanksgiving Day slate, Bengals-Ravens averaged a Nielsen-estimated 8.9 and 25.37 million on NBC, with that figure rising to 28.4 million including a Spanish-language audience on Telemundo and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics. The latter figure surpasses Bears-Packers in 2015 (27.8M) as the highest for a primetime Thanksgiving game. In addition to the caveats regarding Nielsen methodological changes, keep in mind that NBC had not begun tracking its streaming audience with Adobe Analytics in 2015.
The full NFL Thanksgiving slate averaged 44.7 million viewers across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, up 30% from last year and the league’s highest average on the holiday.
