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This past weekend was a great one for football fans—and an even better one for the NFL and its broadcasting partners.
The overtime nail-biter between the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs averaged 42.74 million viewers, according to ViacomCBS, making it the most-watched divisional playoff game from any network since 2017. The game capped off a weekend-long series of ratings wins:
- Fox Sports’s Saturday broadcast of the NFC divisional playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers averaged 36.92 million viewers, making it not just the most-watched Saturday NFL divisional playoff game on any network, but Fox’s most-watched Saturday telecast ever.
- Also on Saturday, the Bengals–Titans divisional playoff game on CBS Sports averaged 30.75 million viewers, making it the most-watched divisional playoff game on a Saturday afternoon in six years.
- NBC Sports’s Sunday afternoon broadcast of the Los Angeles Rams and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers averaged 40 million total viewers, making it the most-watched NBC sports game other than the Super Bowl since the company’s Sunday Night Football franchise rolled out in 2006.
It’s not a fluke. This season’s NFL ratings have been through the roof, showing how live sports ratings have remained higher than much of the rest of linear TV. The NFL’s 2021 regular season averaged 17.1 million viewers overall, the highest regular-season average since 2015, the NFL said earlier this month. And postseason is already racking up ratings wins: CBS Sports says it is so far seeing its best postseason in a decade, with an average viewership of 35.88 million viewers during playoff games.
Two-point conversion: Seems the Super Bowl, which is less than three weeks away, could deliver big audiences to advertisers willing to pay as much as $6.5 million—nearly $1 million more than last year’s high of $5.6 million—for a spot in the game. Knock on wood.—KS