A media-focused preview of the biggest Monday Night Football game in years, Chiefs vs. Eagles in a Super Bowl rematch: How to watch, ratings predictions and what the matchup means for ESPN/ABC.
How to watch Eagles-Chiefs on Monday Night Football
Date: Monday, November 20
Time: 8:15 PM ET
Networks: ABC, ESPN and ESPN+ (traditional broadcast), ESPN2 and ESPN+ (Peyton and Eli “Manningcast”)
Streaming options: ESPN+, Sling, Fubo, DIRECTV STREAM, YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV. (If you purchase a subscription, this site may receive a commission.)
, The full NFL schedule is available here.
Backstory
Monday Night Football moved to ESPN in 2006 and in that time has carried big games only sparingly. MNF was the primetime game of record in the ABC era, but as soon as ESPN acquired the rights, game quality declined noticeably. (If part of football lore, the “they are who we thought they were” Bears-Cardinals game in 2006 would never have sniffed Monday night in the ABC era.) Sunday Night Football on NBC took over as the marquee primetime window and has not relinquished that spot. ESPN would occasionally get a big matchup — notably Brett Favre’s first against his former team, the Packers — but most of its tenure featured low-wattage games that were a step below what one would see on Sunday nights. As the NBC slogan went, Sunday night was football night. Monday night was an afterthought.
That was especially the case in the mid-to-late 2010s, the tail end of the John Skipper era at ESPN. From the league’s perspective, Skipper seemed to personify the Frank Costanza line: “This guy — this is not my kind of guy.” He seemed, per contemporaneous reporting, to hold the NFL and its officials at arms’ length — a noticeable contrast to his cozier relationship with the NBA. More importantly, his ESPN had taken a slightly adversarial stance toward the league, reporting detailed stories about internal conflicts among the owners. The response from the league was to load up the Monday night schedule with especially mediocre games.
After Skipper’s abrupt 2017 exit, ESPN set to repair its relationship under new president Jimmy Pitaro with beefed-up studio programming, regular ABC simulcasts and a top-tier broadcast team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. (There was also conspicuously less negative reporting on internal NFL affairs, but that is another story for another day.) Those efforts have been an unqualified success, with ESPN getting into the Super Bowl rotation for the first time and the MNF slate returning to a level of quality last seen during the original ABC era.
No game better summarizes the improved state of affairs than Eagles-Chiefs, a Super Bowl rematch pitting division leaders and featuring some of the biggest stars in the league, Patrick Mahomes and the unavoidable Kelce brothers. This is not just a game that would have typically gone to Sunday night or late Sunday afternoon, it is arguably the best game of the season. It was foreseeably the best game of the season when the NFL gave it to ESPN and ABC in May. There is simply no universe in which this type of game airs on MNF in the Skipper era, or even the George Bodenheimer era that preceded it. Coming off of ESPN/ABC getting the Cowboys-Buccaneers playoff game in January, not to mention Bills-Bengals two weeks earlier (which was on pace for a massive audience until it was halted), it is apparent that the NFL now views MNF as nearly on par with its Sunday night rival.
To be sure, MNF is not at the level of SNF as of yet — either in terms of game quality or viewership (MNF averaged five million fewer viewers than SNF in the first half of the season, though that includes the Thursday night Kickoff Game). One could even argue that Eagles-Chiefs would have drawn bigger numbers on Sunday rather than Monday night. Nonetheless, this matchup marks a milestone in the ESPN history of Monday Night Football. It will almost certainly be the most-watched regular season game of the ESPN era, surpassing 21.8 million for the previously-mentioned Favre game in 2009. It has a good chance at delivering the top Nielsen-measured primetime audience of the season (the current high is 24.8 million for Chiefs-Jets in Week 4). Yet the real milestone is not the numbers the game will generate, but the status it confers.
Eagles-Chiefs ratings prediction
Given the storylines, stars and teams involved, expect the biggest (Nielsen-measured) primetime audience of the season. The overall Nielsen high is 27.1 million for the Week 9 national window on FOX, and the overall high (including Adobe Analytics, which measures NBC’s streaming viewership) is 27.5 million for the Lions-Chiefs Kickoff Game. Those figures may be out of reach.
NFL Monday Night Football: Eagles-Chiefs (8:20p Mon ABC, ESPN, ESPN2). Prediction: 26.08M.
Relevant ratings history
Here are the most-watched Monday Night Football games since the year 2000. (Excludes Bills-Bengals in January, which was not completed.)
— 2023 (September 11), Bills-Jets: 22.67 million viewers on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2.
— 2005 (November 28), Steelers-Colts: 22.64M on ABC.
— 2005 (November 7), Colts-Patriots: 21.86M on ABC.
— 2009 (October 5), Packers-Vikings: 21.84M on ESPN.
— 2009 (November 30), Patriots-Saints: 21.40M on ESPN.
— 2022 (September 12), Broncos-Seahawks: 19.84M on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2.
— 2001 (September 10), Giants-Broncos, 19.75M on ABC.
— 2002 (November 11), Raiders-Broncos: 19.70M on ABC.
— 2023 (October 16), Cowboys-Chargers: 19.64M on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2.
— 2005 (September 12), Eagles-Falcons: 19.60M on ABC.
(In lieu of ratings predictions going forward, SMW will provide these types of viewing guides for big games.)
