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NBC Sports treated last weekend’s Sunday Night Football game a bit like a mini–Super Bowl and was rewarded with massive viewership.
The network said late Wednesday that the 40–40 tie in prime time between the Packers and Cowboys averaged 26.9 million viewers. The figure for the Sept. 28 contest represents the third-most-watched NFL game so far this season, trailing only a Week 2 game between the Eagles and Chiefs, a Super Bowl rematch on Fox that averaged 33.8 million viewers, and the league’s kickoff game on Sept. 4 between the Cowboys and Eagles on NBC that averaged 28.3 million viewers despite a 65-minute weather delay.
The big-game feel was further codified as NBC Sports buttressed its coverage of the Green Bay–Dallas game by bringing its Football Night in America pregame show to AT&T Stadium in Texas to broadcast on-site, and it did the same with a separate fantasy football and betting show hosted by Matthew Berry.
NBC Sports also leaned heavily in to the subplots surrounding star defensive end Micah Parsons, traded in the preseason from Dallas to Green Bay. The game itself, though ending in a tie unsatisfying to some, still lived up to the hype with seven consecutive lead-changing touchdowns. Before the late drama, though, the game peaked with an average audience of 29.9 million during the second quarter.
The Packers-Cowboys game was also the most-watched overtime game in 19 such contests in NBC’s SNF history.
Through the first four weeks of the season, NBC is averaging 25.5 million viewers for SNF, up 6% from a year ago, the best four-week start in its 20-season history with the primetime showcase, and part of broader audience increases seen across the league. Through Week 3, the NFL was off to its best overall viewership start in league history, averaging 20.5 million viewers per game, and that number will be updated later this week once figures from Monday Night Football on ESPN and ABC arrive.
Last Sunday night’s broadcast will likely fall in the NFL season-long rankings somewhat once other marquee matchups later in the season happen, such as the Chiefs-Cowboys game on Thanksgiving.
The figures speak to the enduring and unrivaled popularity of the NFL, by far the most-watched programming in all of U.S. television, as well as enhanced measurement arriving from Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel process.
