NFL Playoff Ratings Surge As NBC, ESPN Set Network Records

Another overtime thriller in the NFL’s divisional playoffs led to another historic viewership figure.

After CBS drew the best Saturday audience on U.S. television in 32 years for the Bills-Broncos clash, NBC said Thursday that it averaged 45.4 million viewers for the Rams’ nailbiter win over the Bears Sunday night. 

The game, won 20–17 by Los Angeles, surpassed last year’s comparable game by 8% and was the most-watched NFL divisional playoff broadcast in NBC’s history—beating a 1994 matchup between the Chiefs and Oilers that had stood for 32 years. That prior broadcast, which averaged 41.1 million viewers, featured future Pro Football Hall of Famers Joe Montana and Warren Moon.

The Los Angeles-Chicago matchup Sunday peaked with an average audience of 52.6 million during the overtime period. An average of 5.3 million viewers watched the digital simulcast of the game on Peacock and related online properties, marking the largest NFL audience for NBC Sports Digital outside of Super Bowls. 

The drama from the Rams-Bears clash also represents a strong setup for the NFL as it now prepares to air Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8. That broadcast is expected to challenge last year’s Super Bowl on Fox as the most-watched single-network event ever on U.S. television. 

ESPN Makes Major History

The coverage earlier Sunday of the Texans-Patriots divisional playoff game, meanwhile, averaged 38 million viewers on ESPN and ABC. That figure just edged out the 37.8 million viewership average for a comparable Rams-Eagles game last year on NBC in that afternoon slot. 

Much more important to ESPN and parent company Disney, though, is that the Houston-New England game represented the single-most-watched event in network history.

Going back to ESPN’s formation in 1979 and the tens of thousands of live events shown since then across its many platforms, no game has generated a bigger audience than the Patriots’ 28–16 win over the Texans. 

It’s also the most-watched sports event across all of Disney, when also considering ABC, with the exception of Super Bowls on that broadcast network, and Disney’s most-watched telecast of any type since 2014.

The audience for the Texans–Patriots game peaked at an average of 44.9 million viewers late in the second half, near the start of the subsequent Rams–Bears broadcast.

Collectively, the four divisional playoff games averaged 39.2 million viewers, a 5% boost from last year and the second most-watched figure on record for this round of the NFL postseason.

Like the earlier parts of the 2025 NFL season, the divisional round was the first to benefit from the arrival of new and expanded Nielsen methodologies to track audiences, notably Big Data + Panel.