Sports Ratings Tracker

Nielsen has reprocessed the viewership for NBC’s four NFL games from Week 1-3 of the season. The Patriots-Seahawks Kickoff Game has been updated to 25.2 million, up from an originally-reported 25.1 million. The Week 1 Cowboys-Giants “Sunday Night Football” game has been updated to 25.82 million, up from 25.66 million. Colts-Chiefs the following week has been updated to 24.43 million, up from 24.29 million. Finally, Rams-Broncos in Week 3 has been updated to 20.96 million, up from 20.77 million.

The Cowboys and Chiefs played in the two most-watched game windows of Week 3 of the NFL season, with the NFL national window (mostly Cowboys-Bears) taking the top spot with 25.47 million viewers — actually down from last year, despite Nielsen’s methodological changes.

Chiefs-Giants ranked a close second with 25.3 million (a combination of Nielsen and Adobe Analytics).

Monday Night Football (Lions-Ravens) also topped the 20 million mark with 22.8 million.

For more on the NFL Week 3 numbers, see this article.

The season premiere of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” (Ravens-Bills) averaged 24.7 million viewers across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, the highest for SNF in Week 1 of the season in three years. With an Adobe Analytics audience of 3.0 million, the Nielsen-measured viewership would clock in around 21.7 million.

Keep in mind Nielsen is using a new methodology this season that combines its existing panel with “Big Data” for set-top boxes and smart TVs, a figure that will generally be higher than the panel-only numbers that were the currency prior to this year.

As previously noted, last Thursday’s Cowboys-Eagles Kickoff Game averaged 28.3 million (5.0 million per Adobe Analytics, meaning a Nielsen-only audience of about 23.3 million).

NBC averaged 26.5 million viewers for its Week 1 slate, its highest since 2015. Again, keep in mind that prior year averages did not include “Big Data.”