Football Season Launch Garners 28.3M Viewers, Fails to Break Record Due to Weather Interruption
NFL Ratings Soar as Ravens-Bills Game Breaks Records
The NFL season is off to a strong start, with the Ravens-Bills Monday Night Football game breaking records and attracting a massive audience.
The flagship NBC broadcast averaged approximately 23.4 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched games of the season. Peacock and various digital platforms accounted for another 4.9 million streams, further boosting the total audience.
According to Nielsen, the broadcast peaked at 34.3 million viewers late in the second quarter, marking a significant increase from the opening salvo of NBC's 20th season of Sunday Night Football. However, the game was delayed due to a weather disturbance, preventing NBC from topping last year's record delivery for the Ravens-Chiefs opener, which averaged 29.2 million viewers.
The delay was particularly impactful to the audience in the home team's time zone, where 48% of all U.S. TV households are situated. Despite the delay, the average deliveries for Sunday night's Ravens-Bills game are expected to be sufficiently massive to overshadow the results from the Cowboys-Eagles showdown.
The historic winning percentage in such a scenario is now at 0.17%, up from the previous mark of 0.13%. Buffalo's 41-40 victory over Baltimore was an extremely improbable feat, as only three of the 2,315 teams that had been trailing by 15 points in the final four minutes had managed to win before the Bills.
Meanwhile, Dallas' victory over New York was up 6% compared to the year-ago Patriots-Cardinals broadcast. The Sphere's Wizard of Oz has sparked a wicked stock surge for Dolan's company, but no further details about this story are available at this time.
It's worth noting that the rollout of Nielsen's new Big Data + Panel currency has changed the methodology in which the ratings service counts the house. The audience data against which the NFL's ad inventory is transacted is expected to coincide with across-the-board ratings boosts throughout the 2025-26 season.
Nielsen isn't expected to have Sunday's NFL numbers ready for perusal until Wednesday afternoon. The NFL Kickoff deliveries on NBC and Peacock averaged 28.3 million viewers for the Cowboys-Eagles opener. The over/under for NBC's TV and streaming audience for Sunday's NFL game is 25 million viewers.
The Eagles' 24-20 win on Thursday night is expected to land among the top 25 most-watched broadcasts of the year. It's been a while since an NFL game was subjected to a ratings-eroding meteorological disruption.
As for who received the contract for marketing advertising spaces during the Ravens-Bills Monday Night NFL game, there is no information available in the search results at this time.
