The Cowboys-Giants rivalry delivered the top audience so far in Week 1 of the NFL season.
The season premiere of NFL “Sunday Night Football” — Cowboys-Giants — averaged a Nielsen-estimated 25.7 million viewers on NBC, up 4% from Bills-Ravens last year, which averaged 24.7 million across a Nielsen-measured linear audience and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics. NBC no longer issues a combined Nielsen + Adobe figure for NFL games, with its first-party streaming data now included in the Nielsen reported figure.
The Giants’ win, which peaked with 29.0 million viewers, ranks as the most-watched Week 1 edition of “SNF” since 2015. (Prior year comparisons are to the Nielsen + Adobe Analytics figures that NBC is no longer reporting for NFL games.)
Both of NBC’s Week 1 games this year averaged more than 25 million viewers, with the annual Kickoff Game at 25.1 million — marking the first such occurrence since 2015. This year marks the first time since 2022, when NBC’s first Sunday night game pit Tom Brady and the Buccaneers against the Cowboys, that the “SNF” opener topped the Kickoff Game.
Note that out-of-home viewing was not tracked in Nielsen estimates until 2020 or fully accounted for until 2025, that this is only 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 introduced a tweak to its measurement that is intended to better account for co-viewing of games.
The co-viewing enhancement provided a 4% lift to select live events during a pilot test earlier this year, and while that is expected to normalize to a lower figure with full implementation across all programming, it gives an idea of what the possible impact of that change might be.
Shifting to the afternoon windows, FOX and CBS split top honors for a competing doubleheader, the first in Week 1 of the season since 2023. FOX won the late window with 20.35 million for coverage featuring Eagles-Commanders, while CBS drew 18.60 million for coverage featuring Packers-Vikings. Last year, CBS aired the late window unopposed, averaging 23.89 million for coverage featuring Lions-Packers.
CBS won out in the early window with an average of 14.10 million for coverage featuring Bills-Texans in 72% of markets, doing so by a large enough margin that it also came out ahead for the full doubleheader. CBS also came out ahead the last time the NFL scheduled competing doubleheaders in Week 1 three years ago, and has won each of the six “double-doubleheader” weeks that were added to the schedule when the NFL expanded to an 18-week schedule in 2021.
Figures for Monday’s Broncos-Chiefs game will be released on Wednesday at the earliest.
