The NFL was customarily massive on Thanksgiving Day and helped boost college basketball to its largest regular season audience in 15 years.
As previously noted, the Commanders-Cowboys NFL Thanksgiving Day game was the second-most watched on the holiday. The final nationals released by Nielsen on Tuesday increased the game’s audience from 41.38 to 41.76 million, pushing it past a 1990 Giants-49ers Monday Night Football game (41.6M) to rank as the second-most watched NFL regular season game on record. Last year’s Giants-Cowboys Thanksgiving game holds the top spot with over 42 million.
Keep in mind that out-of-home viewing is a factor in all sports viewership, but particularly on holidays like Thanksgiving that feature higher-than-usual levels of co-viewing. Looking at the household rating — which by definition does not include out-of-home viewing — Commanders-Cowboys was the lowest rated Dallas game on Thanksgiving in six years.
Earlier in the day, Packers-Lions scored 33.70 million on FOX — the largest audience on record for a Lions Thanksgiving game and up 6% from Bills-Lions on CBS last year. The 49ers-Seahawks nightcap drew 26.4 million (24.78M per Nielsen and 1.6M per Adobe Analytics), surpassing last year to rank as the most-watched primetime Thanksgiving game since 2015.
Outside of the NFL, the big Thanksgiving Day story was college basketball. Thanks to a lead-in from the Packers-Lions game, FOX averaged a 2.0 rating and 5.18 million viewers for Michigan State-Arizona — the largest regular season college basketball audience in 15 years, since a North Carolina-Duke game on ESPN in 2008 (5.61M). The previous high over that span was 4.75 million for a 2014 Duke-Syracuse game on ESPN. (Keep in mind no other college basketball games over that span have had a direct NFL Thanksgiving lead-in, to say nothing of the out-of-home effect.)
As goes without saying, it was the most-watched college basketball game ever on FOX. The network also averaged its largest audience ever for a women’s game, scoring a 0.6 and 1.12 million for Tennessee-Indiana immediately afterward later in the night.
The last time FOX aired a sporting event directly after a Thanksgiving NFL game was two years ago, when it aired an MLS match that averaged more than 1.8 million.
Elsewhere on the Thanksgiving Day menu, the Mississippi-Mississippi State college football “Egg Bowl” averaged a 1.0 and 2.29 million on ESPN — flat in ratings and up 3% in viewership from last year (1.0, 2.23M) and the largest audience for the game in six years.
Thursday, November 23 sports viewership
