When it comes to the current landscape of the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys and Kansas City Chiefs have established themselves as the league’s two most proven draws.
As such, it feels like a safe bet that some ratings records are about to fall following the news that the Cowboys will be hosting the Chiefs on Thanksgiving Day.
The announcement came on Wednesday morning as a part of the NFL’s slow rollout of its 2025 regular-season schedule. Nate Burleson and Bill Cowher revealed the highly anticipated matchup on CBS Mornings, with the 4:30 p.m. ET kickoff on Nov. 27 set to be nationally televised on CBS and the Paramount+ streaming service.
“This is an all-American Thanksgiving Day game,” Burleson said.
“You think about these two franchises, the biggest brands in the game today,” Cowher added. “And you talk about this window, the 4:30 window on Thanksgiving Day has been the most-watched viewed game in the history of the regular season through the years.”
While plenty can change between now and November, it seems fair to assume that this will be the highest-rated regular-season game in NFL history.
As Cowher alluded to, the mere presence of the Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day would have already put that in play. According to a list compiled by Front Office Sports via historical data from SportsMediaWatch and Statista, five of the league’s 10 most-watched regular-season games have featured Dallas on Thanksgiving. That includes three of the top four, with the Cowboys’ matchup against the New York Giants on Thanksgiving Day 2022 currently holding the title of the NFL’s highest-rated regular-season game with 42.1 million viewers.
Factor in the presence of the Chiefs and the star power of Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, as well as Nielsen’s adjusted methodology, and it’s fair to wonder whether the Thanksgiving Day number might look closer to a conference championship game than a regular-season rating. And that’s before considering the possibility of Taylor Swift being in attendance.
With the Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day having proven to be a ratings draw by themselves, it’s somewhat surprising that the NFL and CBS would also add the Chiefs to the mix rather than putting the Dallas-Kansas City matchup elsewhere on its schedule. But rather than spread the wealth, it appears that the league and its networks are gunning for record ratings in 2025, as also evidenced by the decision to put the Cowboys in the season-opening NFL Kickoff Game against the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles.