The NFL’s Black Friday debut delivered one of the league’s ten smallest audiences this season.
In the first ever NFL game on Black Friday, Jets-Dolphins averaged a 4.0 rating and 9.61 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video — marking the lowest rated and second-least watched game on Prime this season. Only Panthers-Bears two weeks earlier averaged a smaller audience (9.56M). Ratings also hit season-lows in adults 18-49 (3.2), 18-34 (2.5) and 25-54 (3.8), falling below the previous marks set by Panthers-Bears.
The Dolphins’ easy win still delivered the largest football audience on Black Friday since 2011, when an Arkansas-LSU college game averaged 10.4 million on CBS. It dominated college football head-to-head, more-than-doubling the competing Missouri-Arkansas game on CBS (4.09M) and UTSA-Tulane on ABC (1.72M). For more Friday sports viewership, see the linked page.
The NFL added a Black Friday game to its schedule at the request of Amazon, which wanted programming that it could use to promote its services on the biggest shopping day of the year. The mid-afternoon start was necessitated by the league’s antitrust exemption, which prohibits games from competing with high school football on Fridays. Even for the NFL, it may take time before viewers learn the habit of turning on Amazon Prime in the middle of Black Friday to watch an NFL game. (By comparison, NFL games had been airing on Thursday nights for 16 years when Amazon took over the rights last season.)
Not helping matters was the state of the Jets, a marquee team before the season started that quickly became a national TV albatross once Aaron Rodgers got hurt.
For the season, Jets-Dolphins ranks as the eighth-least watched game on any Nielsen-rated network. The only games to average a smaller audience were the previously mentioned Panthers-Bears game, the four Sunday morning games from London on NFL Network, and two cable-only editions of Monday Night Football that aired opposite competing games on ABC.
