NFL Season Opener Aters 28.3 Million Viewers Due to Weather-Related Postponement, Failing to Break Viewership Record
The National Football League (NFL) is gearing up for a season of across-the-board ratings boosts, as its $5.2 billion of ad inventory is expected to coincide with a surge in viewership. This prediction follows a series of impressive audience figures in recent games.
The opening salvo of NBC's 20th season of Sunday Night Football was on pace to average 31.6 million viewers before a weather delay. The flagship NBC broadcast, which averaged approximately 23.4 million viewers, peaked at 34.3 million viewers late in the second quarter. Despite a weather delay that prevented NBC from topping last year's record delivery for the Ravens-Chiefs nail-biter, the audience remained substantial.
The weather outage during the Cowboys-Eagles showdown had no material impact on the performance guarantees made with advertisers. This is a testament to the robust nature of the NFL's advertising market.
Nielsen's new Big Data + Panel currency has changed the methodology in which the ratings service counts the house. This new approach is expected to provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the NFL's audience. The rollout of BDP includes measurement from set-top boxes and smart TVs across 45 million households and 75 million devices.
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 is historically significant, 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.
The NFL Kickoff deliveries on NBC and Peacock averaged 28.3 million viewers for the Cowboys-Eagles opener. Peacock and various other digital platforms accounted for another 4.9 million streams. 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. The Ravens-Bills game should have a sufficiently massive average delivery to overshadow the results from the Cowboys-Eagles showdown.
However, it's worth noting that the specific advertising agency that represented the NFL commercial during the Ravens-Bills game on Sunday is not mentioned in the available search results.
As we move towards the 2025-26 season, the NFL's audience data promises to be as captivating as the games themselves. Stay tuned for more updates as Nielsen is not expected to have the Sunday NFL numbers ready for perusal until Wednesday afternoon.
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