Already this season, four of the five largest NFL audiences have been for games featuring the league’s two biggest draws, the Cowboys and Chiefs.
Sunday’s Week 2 NFL national window (Commanders-Cowboys in most markets) averaged 27.21 million viewers on FOX, down from an Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl rematch in the same week last year (33.8M), but the largest audience of the young NFL season.
The Cowboys’ first two games this season rank as the two most-watched thus far, with their season opener against the Giants on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” placing second at 25.66 million. That also means the Cowboys have played in the most-watched game in each of the first two weeks this season, a streak likely to extend to three after this coming weekend — when their game against the Ravens in Brazil headlines the same national window on CBS.
Viewership unsurprisingly outpaced the previous week’s competing national windows on FOX (20.35M) and CBS (18.60M).
It has long been accepted that the Cowboys are the biggest draw in pro football, but that status has been challenged in recent years by the Patrick Mahomes-era Kansas City Chiefs. In their second-straight primetime game to start the season, the Chiefs attracted an audience of 24.3 million viewers for their overtime win over the Colts on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” — up 13% from Falcons-Vikings last year (21.5M per Nielsen and Adobe Analytics) and the most-watched Week 2 edition of “SNF” since 2015.
(Note that out-of-home viewing was not included in Nielsen estimates until 2020 or fully accounted for until 2025, that this is only in the second year of a new Nielsen methodology integrating “Big Data” from smart TVs, set-top boxes and first party data with its traditional panel, and that Nielsen has recently tweaked its measurement to better account for co-viewing of games.)
The game also ranks as the fourth-most watched of the season, behind the two aforementioned Cowboys games and the Patriots-Seahawks Kickoff Game. (Three of the top four — the two editions of “SNF” and the Kickoff Game — have aired on NBC.)
Given that Kansas City missed the playoffs last season and lost Mahomes to an ACL injury in the process, it was no guarantee when the schedule came out in May that the team would be primetime caliber on the field or in the ratings by Week 1. But Mahomes is back, the team is 2-0, and their first two games rank among the five most-watched — with their opener on “Monday Night Football” six nights earlier placing fifth (23.2M).
Some credit of course belongs to the windows themselves. Not counting Monday’s Giants-Rams, figures for which will not be available until Wednesday, the Chiefs and Cowboys have played in three of the four primetime windows on broadcast this season.
In other Week 2 action, CBS averaged 19.3 million for the first singleheader window of the season, featuring Patriots-Steelers in a plurality of markets — up 29% from last year and the most-watched Week 2 singleheader on record. Viewership surpassed both of the network’s Week 1 windows, which as previously noted faced a competing doubleheader on FOX.
