CBS, Fox break decade-old viewership records during NFL Week 1

Like stocks (I think?), TV ratings go up.

At least, that’s what it looks like through the early part of the football season. The Week 1 NFL slate is officially in the books, and both CBS and Fox have record audiences to show for it.

According to a CBS press release, Sunday’s late-afternoon window (mostly the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers) averaged 23.9 million viewers, making it the most-watched Week 1 game on CBS since the NFL returned to the network in 1998. That same superlative expands to the early-afternoon regional window (led by the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Jets), which averaged 17.1 million viewers. Altogether, CBS averaged 20.4 million viewers across its two windows on Sunday, a 15% year-over-year increase.

Fox drew a similarly monstrous number for its singleheader game (New York Giants-Washington Commanders in 51% of markets), averaging 17.9 million viewers for the window. Per Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, it’s the most-watched singleheader window on any network since 2015.

Of course, these viewership figures come with all of the Nielsen caveats that are new for this football season. Last week, Nielsen began rolling out its new Big Data + Panel methodologies that include 75 million connected devices in addition to its normal panel of over 40,000 households. The change is widely expected to increase live sports viewership. Week 1 was also the first during the NFL regular season to include Nielsen’s expanded out-of-home viewing sample, which debuted for the Super Bowl in February. The combination of both changes has sent live sports viewership soaring so far this football season.

For CBS, as Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch pointed out, it’s important to keep in mind that the network has not aired an unopposed doubleheader in Week 1 since 2015. In recent years, the NFL has experimented with putting so-called “double-doubleheaders” in Week 1, in which both CBS and Fox air a national window game in the late afternoon. Last year, Fox got the Week 1 doubleheader to itself for Tom Brady’s broadcasting debut.

As with all live sports viewership data, the context is important. While it is reasonable to believe that NFL viewership has truly increased in recent years, it is becoming increasingly difficult to measure the magnitude of that increase with proper context.

Regardless, the bigger numbers bode well for both the league and its broadcast partners. And they certainly look good in press releases, which will likely be abundant this season as networks take advantage of the favorable comparisons.