Welcome back to “The Needle,” a new ratings-focused column on Sports Media Watch that will break down the numbers, attempt to put some context behind the data, and discuss broader trends in measurement and television viewing.
If there is one takeaway from the NFL schedule, which was released in full Wednesday, it is that the league is going big. It is going big on Opening Night, it is going big on holidays, it is going big against the competition. No marquee or competitive window was left unmaximized.
To begin with, the league has scheduled “America’s Team,” the Dallas Cowboys, for the Kickoff Game, Thanksgiving and Christmas — the first time any team has played in or on all three since the 2011 Packers. The Cowboys’ opponents in each game are the defending Super Bowl champion Eagles, defending AFC champion Chiefs and NFC finalist Commanders, respectively.
The Chiefs-Cowboys game in particular is a signal of the league’s approach to the coming season. It has been a solid decade since the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving opponent had a winning record the prior season. The NFL scheduled Dallas against the Giants last year, after New York went 6-11 the prior season; against Washington in 2023 (8-8-1 in 2022), the Giants in 2022 (4-13 in 2021), the Raiders in 2021 (8-8 in 2020), Washington in 2020 (3-13 in 2019), Buffalo in 2019 (6-10 in 2018), Washington in 2018 (7-9 in 2017), and the Chargers in 2017 (5-11 in 2016).
Some of those scheduling decisions worked out. The 2019 Bills began their run of postseason contention and the Giants had an unexpectedly good season in 2022. Nevertheless, none of those games ranked among the most anticipated matchups when the schedule came out, and yet they were the most-watched of every regular season.
Contrast that with Chiefs-Cowboys, pitting the two biggest draws in the NFL — and featuring a Kansas City team that has made the Super Bowl three-straight years. These teams play only once every four years, and their previous meeting in 2021 was not on Thanksgiving, Christmas or in the Kickoff Game, but instead anchored the late doubleheader window in Week 11.
Traditionally, the NFL has avoided scheduling its best possible matchups for days like Thanksgiving, when just about any pairings will do. It has been more important to ensure that the best games anchor the league’s bread-and-butter of Sunday afternoon and primetime than the high-viewing holidays that will perform no matter the game. But in the out-of-home era, the massive audiences associated with holiday viewing have become impossible to resist.
“We’ve seen how big those numbers can be,” NFL EVP/media distribution Hans Schroeder said in a media availability Thursday. “When we looked at the year and saw the depth and the number of great matchups we had, we thought that was a great opportunity to put some of our best onto Thanksgiving, and really serve the fans. … That’s a great day, where a lot of them are available to watch.”
According to Richard Deitsch of The Athletic, the “thinking, based on talking to a number of people at different networks, is that the NFL thinks the game can set a record for the most-viewed NFL regular-season game in history.” That would seem to be a sure thing, given the popularity of the teams.
Would it be better for the overall season average to run back Giants-Cowboys on Thanksgiving and save Chiefs-Cowboys for Week 8, thereby having two games with 30+ million viewers instead of one with 40 or 50 million? Perhaps. For the NFL, the opportunity is too much to pass up.
That is not just the case for Thanksgiving. The league’s Christmas schedule this season opens with Cowboys-Commanders, followed by Vikings-Lions (last season’s top two NFC teams) and Broncos-Chiefs. Lesser games would undoubtedly perform well, freeing up those marquee matchups for Sundays and primetime — but the NFL may have finally reached the point where it feels those sorts of tradeoffs are unnecessary.
The risk (if there is one), is taking for granted the golden goose that is any given Sunday. For the NBA, Christmas is by far the most-watched day of the regular season. For the NFL, Christmas did not even produce the largest audience of the week last season, or the season before, or the season before that. The NFL’s success has been in turning an ordinary Sunday or Monday night into an ‘event,’ one of the reasons why the league has traditionally taken holidays for granted.
Chiefs-Cowboys may deliver upwards of 50 million viewers on Thanksgiving, but the NFL’s true drawing power is its ability to attract an audience of 30 million on a nondescript November Sunday, as it did for Chiefs-Bills last season. The league can certainly do both, as its depth is such that a number of marquee matchups remain on its Sunday schedule (including a Super Bowl rematch in Week 2 and another Bills-Chiefs game in Week 9) — a luxury owing to an era stacked with marquee teams.
Yet it is possible to go overboard. To that point, consider the league’s decision to schedule Eagles-Commanders and Packers-Bears for the third Saturday in December — the first weekend of the College Football Playoff. It is fairly obvious that the NFL is being territorial regarding that Saturday, a day on which the league has played for 37 of the past 40 years, as Schroeder noted in Thursday’s media conference. “That’s an NFL day,” he said.
But that third Saturday in December has rarely boasted games of such quality. An NFC Championship rematch and the oldest rivalry in the sport? Even last year’s pairing of Chiefs-Texans and Ravens-Steelers pales in comparison. Go back two years and the league scheduled a nondescript tripleheader of solid, but unspectacular matchups for that day — Vikings-Bengals, Steelers-Colts and Broncos-Lions, nothing to write home about.
The NFL obviously wants to win any head-to-head with the CFP, in keeping with its increasingly aggressive approach to competition. On Christmas opposite the NBA, on the third Saturday of December opposite the CFP, and even in late October opposite the World Series — when Sunday Night Football could pit Aaron Rodgers against the Packers, and Monday Night Football pairs the Chiefs and Commanders — the league has scheduled some of its strongest matchups, a far cry from the days when it would skip a week of SNF to avoid the World Series.
In the case of Christmas and the World Series, those matchups are at least still airing in quality TV windows. In the case of the CFP, taking games that would have been worthy of Sunday or primetime and wasting them on a competitive Saturday seems like an unnecessary move.
A few weeks ago, this column argued that the NBA’s approach to its Easter Sunday schedule — opting to showcase the Oklahoma City Thunder rather than the ratings draw Golden State Warriors — was an indication that the league was not as concerned about the ratings as one might think.
For the NFL, by far the most attractive property in all of television, the new schedule makes clear that the league sees maximizing its audience as a high priority, whether on high-viewing holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas or in competitive windows against other properties. (It is not the top priority, of course, otherwise the league would have put its Christmas games on broadcast television rather than streaming.)
Of all the leagues, the NFL has the least need to schedule its games with the ratings in mind. Yet perhaps more than any other league, it does so without hesitation. For this coming season, the league has likely assured itself its largest audience on record, and even more dominant wins over the CFP, NBA and World Series (which actually eked out a head-to-head win over Monday Night Football last October).
The old Mark Cuban line ‘pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered’ seems quaint when referring to the NFL, which seems to grow bigger and bigger every year with no end in sight. It is in fact the case that the NFL takes everyone else to the slaughter, a fact that the league is clearly leaning into this year.
Plus: WNBA, NBA and more
Entering the WNBA season, which begins Friday, the key question is whether the league can expand upon the ratings success of a year ago. Caitlin Clark and the improved Fever will of course be the marquee attraction all season long, starting with their season opener against Angel Reese and the Sky.
Not unlike the NFL, the WNBA took a much more ratings-conscious approach to the schedule this year than last. Last season, Clark debuted on a Tuesday night on ESPN2 against the low-profile Connecticut Sun. This season, a Saturday afternoon on ABC against Clark’s big market rival. (Even better would have been Sunday on ABC leading into the NBA, but maybe next time.)
The most-watched game of last year’s regular season — and the most-watched regular season WNBA game overall since 2001 — was a Sunday afternoon Fever-Sky matchup in late June that averaged 2.30 million on ESPN. Can the league surpass that mark on the opening weekend of play? If so, it will be a bullish sign for the rest of the season.
Knicks-Celtics has emerged as the top draw in the second round of the NBA Playoffs, helped a bit by the fact that Stephen Curry missed nearly all of the Timberwolves-Warriors series. Viewership for Monday’s Game 4 and Wednesday’s Game 5 increased 50 and 46 percent respectively from last year’s equivalent windows, which pit the Celtics against the Cavaliers. Game 6 on Friday figures to keep the good times rolling, and a Game 7 Monday has blockbuster potential.
PGA Tour ratings had been on a roll until last weekend’s final round of the Truist Championship, which drew a respectable audience but was no match for Rory McIlroy’s win at Quail Hollow a year ago. Can it regain its momentum at this week’s PGA Championship?
McIlroy was seven shots off the lead in 38th as of this writing Friday, and after his stirring Masters victory, he may well be the biggest star in the sport. Scottie Scheffler, the biggest newsmaker of last year’s PGA Championship, is in a tie for seventh. Those are the sort of names that will need to be in the mix in the weekend.
Thursday’s opening round audience of 955,000 marked a decline from the past two years (1.1M each year), but the first two rounds of the Masters declined as well before the weekend surged to multi-year highs.
