The NFL continues to give thanks for out-of-home viewing as a Thanksgiving stinker between the Cowboys and Commanders delivered the league’s second-largest on the holiday.
Thursday’s Washington-Dallas NFL Thanksgiving Day game averaged an 11.9 rating and 41.76 million viewers on CBS, trailing only Giants-Cowboys on FOX last year (42.1M) as the most-watched NFL regular season game on record. The previous second-place mark was 41.6 million for a 1990 Giants-49ers game on ABC’s Monday Night Football.
Thanksgiving has always produced disproportionately large NFL audiences, but that has especially been the case in the out-of-home era. The three most-watched Thanksgiving Day games have all come since Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its national estimates three years ago, with each of the three topping the 40 million mark. Prior to the out-of-home era, no Thanksgiving game had ever averaged more than 38.4 million (Dolphins-Cowboys in 1993). (For a list of the ten most-watched Thanksgiving NFL games prior to this season, see the linked page.)
Out-of-home viewing accounted for a whopping 41% of the audience for Commanders-Cowboys. For a full analysis of the out-of-home performance, see this article.
It may be the case that 40 million viewers is the floor for Thanksgiving Day Cowboys games going forward, as one would imagine most years will produce a better quality game than this year’s rout of perennially mediocre Washington.
As goes without saying, Cowboys-Commanders delivered the largest NFL audience of the season — surpassing the days-old mark held by Eagles-Chiefs on Monday Night Football (29.02M). The Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game almost always finishes as the most-watched of a given regular season.
In other Thanksgiving Day action, Packers-Lions averaged an 11.9 and 33.70 million on FOX — the largest audience on record for a Lions Thanksgiving Day game. Viewership increased 6% from the previous high of 31.78 million for Bills-Lions last year. The Packers’ win, which peaked with 41.6 million viewers from 3:15-3:30 PM ET, delivered the second-largest audience of the season.
In the nightcap, 49ers-Seahawks averaged a 9.2 and 26.4 million (24.78 million per Nielsen, plus a streaming audience of 1.6 million measured by Adobe Analytics) — up from Patriots-Vikings last year (26.0M) and the second-largest audience for a primetime game on Thanksgiving. Bears-Packers holds the top spot with 27.8 million in 2015.
