NBC Sports delivered a near-record audience for the NFL’s season-opening game on Sept. 4, just missing history due to an in-game weather delay.
The network said Monday it averaged 28.3 million viewers for the Eagles’ 24–20 victory over the Cowboys, representing the second-best audience for an NFL kickoff game, trailing only last year’s Ravens-Chiefs clash to open the 2024 season that drew an average audience of 29.2 million.
The broadcast from Philadelphia, however, was a story of two parts, punctuated by the severe weather locally that produced a 65-minute delay during the third quarter. During that first chunk, the game was on pace to average 31.6 million viewers and easily surpass last year’s milestone. The post-delay audience, stretching from 11:24 p.m. to 12:18 a.m. ET, fell to an average of 20.2 million, dragging down the final figure for the full game.
Original expectations last week from Nielsen were that the game measurement would be inclusive of the weather delay, but the agency then reversed course and said that it would be omitted. That ultimately turned out to be the case once the data arrived, but the weather still had a significant impact.
That post-delay audience was just 59% of the peak viewership of 34.3 million registered during the second quarter.
A similar situation happened last year when an Oct. 6 Sunday Night Football game between the Cowboys and Steelers was marred by a postponement of nearly 90 minutes at the start, also due to severe weather. That contest drew an average audience of 20.3 million people, the lowest SNF figure to that point of the season, down 23% from the comparable Week 5 game in 2023, and below the season-long average of 21.6 million for the Sunday primetime showcase.
That result was particularly striking given the status of Dallas and Pittsburgh as two of the NFL’s most popular teams, a long-standing rivalry between them that includes three meetings in the Super Bowl, and a competitive game, once it started, that saw the Cowboys prevail 20–17 after a game-winning touchdown with 20 seconds left.
The Cowboys-Eagles matchup was the first game of the NFL’s 2025 regular season to feature data from Nielsen’s newly introduced Big Data + Panel measurement process, which incorporates additional data from set-top boxes and smart TVs, and is designed to provide a more accurate view.
Data from YouTube’s livestream of the Sept. 5 game in Brazil between the Chiefs and Chargers, which fell below expectations, did not include Big Data + Panel methodology, angering other networks.
The streaming audience for the kickoff game on Peacock and other NBC and NFL digital platforms averaged 4.9 million, the network’s second-best simulstreamed NFL game ever and topping streams for three prior Super Bowls that it aired.
