Tuesday brought another round of mixed viewership news for the NFL to start the 2026 season.
After NBC Sports posted lower viewership for last Wednesday’s kickoff game and Netflix was flat for its stream of Thursday’s game from Australia, CBS Sports said its late Sunday afternoon national game between the Packers and Vikings averaged 18.6 million viewers, down 22% from a comparable Lions-Packers game in Week 1 last year.
Like last week’s unusual start to the season, the Sunday NFL broadcasts also had significant factors that make direct comparisons to last year difficult. Both CBS and Fox had late-afternoon Sunday games for Week 1 this year, forming what’s commonly known as a “double-doubleheader” among the two networks. Last year, CBS had the Week 1 late Sunday afternoon national window to itself.
Fox won the 4:25 ET window to start the 2026 season, averaging 20.3 million viewers for its coverage of a Commanders-Eagles game.
Even with Fox’s bigger viewership in the late-afternoon window, CBS won the Sunday doubleheader overall, averaging 16.4 million viewers. CBS’s figures were aided by a strong early showing in the early window, averaging 14.1 million viewers there, led by the Bills’ roller-coaster win over the Texans.
NBC, meanwhile, rounded out its opening week of 2026 NFL coverage with an average of 25.7 million viewers for the Sunday Night Football game between the Cowboys and Giants, up 4% from a comparable Bills-Ravens game last year. With the 25.1 million average for the kickoff game between the Patriots and Seahawks, the network topped 25 million for each of its Week 1 NFL games for the first time since 2015.
ESPN has not yet released viewership numbers for its Monday Night Football debut, which featured the successful return of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes from two torn knee ligaments. But put together, the audience numbers so far suggest that it could be a somewhat tougher climb for the NFL to repeat its banner 2025, the league’s best viewership year since 1989.
Streaming Rancor
Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill, meanwhile, took aim at Netflix’s exclusive coverage of the Australia game between the 49ers and Rams, the first of an expanded five-game NFL package this season for the streaming giant.
“It’s not the first inning anymore,” Mulvihill said in a social-media post. “Putting sports exclusively on streaming has failed. [It] alienates longtime fans without reaching new ones.”
Mulvihill’s comment, however, overlooks that fellow streamer Amazon last year posted the largest percentage audience viewership increase of any full-season NFL rights holder—and the best-ever audience for the Thursday Night Football package on any carrier.
