NFL ratings were across the spectrum on Sunday, from the highest rated game of the season to a dud of a Sunday night contest.
The excessively hyped game between the New England Patriots and Dallas Cowboys drew an 18.5/35 overnight rating on Sunday, up 37% from Chiefs/Steelers last year. The game is the highest rated game of the season, and the 18.5 marks the highest overnight for a regular season NFL game since Cowboys/Giants drew a 19.1 on FOX last December. To put the 18.5 in perspective, no sporting event outside of football and the Olympics has drawn an overnight that high since 2004.
The game is the highest rated on CBS since the network returned to airing games in 1998, beating the previous high mark by 9%. The game averaged a 37.0 rating in Dallas-Fort Worth and a 36.5 in Boston.
Because the game stretched almost to 8:00 PM, the rating carried CBS in prime-time. From 7:00 PM ET to 8:00, Patriots/Cowboys averaged 26 million viewers, making that portion of the game the highest rated and most viewed television program of the entire fall season (eclipsing the season premieres of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI). On the strength of that performance, CBS finished first for the night on Sunday, ahead of second-place ABC and third-place NBC — which drew its lowest rating of the season for Saints/Seahawks.
The Sunday night game, which looked decent at the start of the season, featured a then-winless New Orleans club against a Seattle team that has fallen off the radar. The game drew an 8.4/13 rating, the second lowest overnight ever for NBC Sunday Night Football — ahead of only the 8.1/12 rating Raiders/Broncos drew on the comparable Sunday night last year. NBC finished second for every hour of prime-time last night, finishing Sunday with a 3.3 adults 18-49 rating, and falling well behind CBS and ABC.
Through seven games, NBC is averaging an 11.9 metered market rating, up 3% from an 11.6 through seven games last year.
