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NFL viewership records just keep coming
It's been a very, very good year for the National Football League in terms of viewership. Particular record highs came from their Thanksgiving numbers, their Thursday Night Football numbers, and the Packers-Bears wild-card round game, but all of those fit into a larger story of NFL viewing dominance. Indeed, as I wrote in a premium post earlier this month, comparing any other sport's viewership numbers to the NFL is becoming less valuable than it was; the league is clearly its own thing, and operating on a different level. And the numbers for last week's divisional round playoffs bolster that, as the various networks' releases on this illustrate:
As Jon Lewis noted at Sports Media Watch, the "ESPN's most-watched event ever" claim doesn't really hold up considering that most of those viewers came on ABC rather than the cable network. They're also well below many ABC numbers from the era before Disney bought that network (and ESPN) in 1996. But this does still count as the largest non-Super Bowl sports event in Disney history, and it was up 10 percent from last year's Nielsen-only audience (34.58 million) for Rams-Eagles on NBC in that slot (although the Nielsen+Adobe Analytics number of 37.8 million for that game is closer, and more comparable to the Big Data+Panel methodology Nielsen uses now). More critically for the overall story, though, the records here for NBC, CBS, and ESPN/ABC meant that the overall average divisional round audience was 39.2 million viewers (despite the low number for the Seahawks-49ers blowout on Fox), up five percent from last year and the second-best number for this round on record behind two years ago.
How will the conference championship games stack up? Well, the biggest key factor may be how close (or not) they are; Seahawks-49ers was far from a bad matchup, but lost its appeal to many viewers early on with Seattle taking a 17-0 first-quarter lead en route to a 41-6 win. And there are some concerns for the Broncos in particular, who have to turn to QB Jarrett Stidham (who hasn't thrown a NFL pass since 2023) thanks to Bo Nix getting hurt in last week's win over the Bills. If the Patriots go up big early, people might tune out. But both Patriots-Broncos and Rams-Seahawks set up as great potential matchups, and the NFL's season-long story suggests these numbers will again be very good indeed. We'll find out Sunday, but for the moment, everything viewership is continuing to trend exceptionally well for them.
