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Thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, delivered the most-watched game of the 2024 regular season—and showed the strength of the Cowboys as a viewership draw, regardless of the team’s overall performance.
The Giants-Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day, which aired at 4:30 p.m. ET on Fox, drew 38.5 million viewers, over seven million more than the previous season-high of 31.2 million for Chiefs-Bills in Week 11. The record came despite the teams carrying a combined record of 6-16 entering the game. Neither team’s Week 1 starting quarterback played as Dak Prescott suffered a season-ending hamstring injury in Week 9 while Daniel Jones was released on Nov. 22 after being benched.
Despite the big number, subpar seasons for Dallas and New York may have contributed to the game attracting the lowest viewership for a Cowboys game on Thanksgiving since 2020—including an all-time regular-season record of 42.2 million viewers in a 2022 matchup between the same two NFC East rivals. But this year’s mark would still come in as the fourth-highest all-time (though Nielsen began tracking out-of-home viewership in 2020).
The Cowboys have ostensibly been superseded by the Chiefs as the NFL’s biggest draw this season, but the back-to-back Super Bowl champions were not on the Thanksgiving slate. The Chiefs played the Raiders in the NFL’s second Black Friday game, which was streamed exclusively on Amazon Prime Video. Viewership numbers for that game are not yet available, though Prime Video numbers tend to be lower than CBS, NBC, and Fox due to distribution.
The primetime Thanksgiving game between the Packers and Dolphins which kicked off at 8:20 p.m. ET drew 26.6 million viewers across NBC platforms, down slightly from 26.9 million for 49ers-Seahawks last year, but up slightly from the 26 million who watched Patriots-Vikings in 2022.
Viewership numbers for the early Thanksgiving game between the Bears and Lions at 12:30 p.m. ET on CBS have not been reported yet.
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