The opening round of the NFL knockouts drew a slightly smaller — though still huge — TV audience than a year ago.
The six games of the wild card round averaged around 28.4 million viewers, down 4% from the opening round of 2022 (29.65 million). Three of the TV shows top 30 million viewers, led by 33.21 million for Fox’s Sunday TV show about the New York Giants’ victory over the Minnesota Vikings. That competition, however, was down about 20% from the same period last year, when 41.5 million viewers watched the San Francisco 49ers beat the Dallas Cowboys — the largest audience for a wild card game since. 2015.
This year’s ABC and ESPN simulation of the Cowboys game, its 31-14 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Monday night, drew 31.2 million people (including ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes). This was the second-largest audience in the round and the biggest increase in six surges, up nearly 36% year-over-year. CBS’s Sunday Early Game (Buffalo vs. Miami) had 30.87 million viewers and about 2% increase from the same time it aired a year ago.
Fox’s Saturday afternoon game (San Francisco-Seattle, 27.46 million viewers) is 1% of where it was in 2022, while two NBC primetime games (Jacksonville-LA Chargers, 20). .61 million and Cincinnati-Baltimore, 26.87 million) declines of 22 percent and 7 percent year-on-year. However, NBC noted that its two games marked the first time any broadcaster had averaged 20 million viewers on consecutive nights in two years – the last time NBC hosted wild card games. on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
The small decline for wild card rounds reflects compared to the regular season, where NFL games average 16.7 million viewers (including streaming) — a 2 percent drop mainly due to the movement of Thursday Night Football from Fox and the NFL Network to Amazon’s Prime Video.
The Afternoon Window of CBS and Fox and of NBC Sunday Night Football All up a little bit. ESPN and ABC Monday Night Football dropped about 5%, except for the week 17 game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals which was canceled after Bills’ Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on the field. Audiences up to that point assumed it would be the most viewed MNF match of the season and bring the season back to last year’s level.
