NFL Wild-Card Games Draw Massive Viewership

A monster regular season for NFL viewership has continued with similarly massive audiences for the league’s wild-card games this past weekend.

The initial five wild-card games played last Saturday and Sunday set a series of league and network milestones—in many cases improving dramatically from last year’s group of opening playoff games—and included a new record for any exclusively streamed game in NFL history. The latest viewership figures included:

• Rams at Panthers (Fox): The Los Angeles victory over upstart Carolina on Saturday afternoon averaged 28 million viewers, up 7% from the comparable game last year, and the most-watched Saturday afternoon wild-card game on any network since 2011. 
• Packers at Bears (Amazon): The dramatic comeback win by Chicago on Saturday night averaged 31.6 million viewers, representing not only the company’s most-watched NFL game ever, by far, but the league’s most-streamed game on any platform—beating the 27.5 million that Netflix averaged for a late-afternoon Christmas game less than three weeks ago. It’s been a season full of milestones for Amazon, including three different Thursday Night Football audience records during the regular season. The figure for the Green Bay–Chicago contest smashed the comparable wild-card game last year, also on Amazon, by 43%.
• Bills at Jaguars (CBS): The game, won by Buffalo, averaged 32.7 million viewers. That figure is up 5% from the comparable game last season and represents the most-watched early Sunday wild-card contest on record for any network. 
• 49ers at Eagles (Fox): As San Francisco ended Philadelphia’s bid to repeat as league champion, the late Sunday afternoon game averaged 41 million viewers, most of any game the entire weekend and Fox’s most-watched wild-card game since 2015. The figure beat a comparable Packers-Eagles game from last year by 14%.
• Chargers at Patriots (NBC): New England’s first playoff victory since the 2018 season, before the departure of iconic quarterback Tom Brady, averaged 28.9 million viewers in Sunday prime time. That was just behind the 29 million average viewership for a comparable Commanders-Buccaneers game last year, but it still represented the most-watched Sunday-night broadcast of any type on U.S. television since Super Bowl LIX last February. 

ESPN’s viewership figure for the Monday-night wild-card game between the Texans and Steelers is expected Wednesday. That matchup, a blowout win for Houston, proved to be the final game in Pittsburgh for head coach Mike Tomlin after 19 seasons. 

Viewership Trends

The initial wild-card viewership totals follow a 2026 NFL regular season that averaged 18.7 million viewers per game, the league’s highest figure since 1989 and one that extended the NFL’s dominance as the most popular programming in all of U.S. television. 

The divisional round, one that includes varying degrees of rest for the competing teams, will begin Saturday. Late Monday, the NFL finalized the broadcast slots and networks for the four games. 

On Saturday, CBS will air the Bills at the Broncos at 4:30 p.m. ET, followed by the 49ers at the Seahawks on Fox at 8 p.m. ET. On Sunday, ESPN and ABC will air the Texans at the Patriots at 3 p.m. ET, followed by the Rams at the Bears on NBC at 6:30 p.m. ET.

League scheduling decisions include a wide variety of factors, including market sizes of the competing teams, fairness to broadcasters both within a single year and across multiple seasons, on-field histories, weather, and ticket sales, among others. The choice to place the upcoming Rams-Bears game in the late Sunday slot was driven materially by a desire to have the Nos. 2 and 3 U.S. media markets in that final broadcast position, as viewership typically builds within each postseason weekend.