Even in a down season, the Kansas City Chiefs continue to establish themselves as the new “America’s team.”
Sunday’s NFL national window, featuring Chiefs-Broncos in most markets, averaged a 13.6 rating and 28.89 million viewers on CBS — actually down 10% in ratings and 7% in viewership from last year, when the network aired Chiefs-Bills (15.1, 31.14M), but still the third-largest audience of the NFL season.
The now 5-5 Chiefs have played in the three most-watched telecasts of the season, with their Week 2 Super Bowl rematch against the Eagles placing first and their Week 9 matchup with the Bills ranking second.
Including Adobe Analytics viewership for NBC games — the network is the only one whose streaming viewership is not tracked by Nielsen — Kansas City has been featured in four of the top five windows this season, with their Week 6 “Sunday Night Football” matchup with Detroit ranking fifth (27.4M across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics).
As for the Super Bowl champion Eagles, their “Sunday Night Football” win over the Lions averaged a 10.8 and 21.1 million on NBC, with that figure rising to 23.5 million including streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics. On both a Nielsen-only and combined basis, it was the most-watched Week 11 edition of “SNF” since Chiefs-Broncos in 2013. (Keep in mind that Nielsen did not track out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100 percent of markets until earlier this year.)
“SNF” was comfortably the most-watched primetime window of the week as ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” (Cowboys-Raiders) averaged 17.9 million across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes and NFL+ — up 5% from Texans-Cowboys last year, well within the margin that could be explained entirely by Nielsen’s methodological changes this year.
The Cowboys’ win was the first “MNF” game after the Disney networks returned to YouTube TV. Compared to the two “MNF” windows during the YouTube TV blackout, viewership trailed Eagles-Packers the previous week (20.6M) but topped Cardinals-Cowboys two weeks earlier (16.4M).
After airing a game in each of the first 11 weeks this season, ABC is scheduled for just one in the next six weeks — Eagles-Chargers in Week 14. Barring any schedule changes, the stretch of five cable-exclusive “MNF” games in six weeks would be the longest since the 2022 season.
Returning to the daytime windows, FOX averaged an 8.2 and 17.24 million (+12%) for its singleheader window. CBS was not far behind with an 8.2 and 16.53 million for the first half of its doubleheader, down from last year’s audience of nearly 20 million (19.8M), which was the network’s largest for the early game window since 1992.
CBS ended up averaging 22.74 million for its full doubleheader, trailing only last year as its highest in Week 11 of the season since resuming NFL coverage in 1998.
Week 11 opened with a 6.4 and 13.45 million for the Jets-Patriots “Thursday Night Football” game on Amazon Prime Video. Officially, that marks a 7% decline from Commanders-Eagles last year (14.42M). But recall that Nielsen in September shifted to a new “Big Data + Panel” methodology that builds on the traditional Nielsen panel by adding data from smart TVs, set-top boxes and in some cases (e.g. Amazon) internal, first-party measurement. It is official Nielsen policy to compare “Big Data + Panel” to last year’s panel-only viewership.
But while “Big Data + Panel” only became official Nielsen currency in September, it had been tracked the prior two years — and Amazon regularly publicized those viewership figures. Compared to last year’s “Big Data” figure for Commanders-Eagles, viewership fell 13% from 15.51 million.
Rounding out the Week 11 slate, the Commanders-Dolphins International Series game from Madrid averaged a 2.8 and 5.65 million on NFL Network. NFL Network averaged 6.2 million viewers for its six International Series games this season (including Adobe Analytics), up 32% from last year — an increase sizable enough as to not be attributed to methodological changes. It was the highest average for international games on the network.
