It wasn’t a Super Bowl–type audience for Sunday’s high-profile Eagles-Chiefs game, but the Super Bowl LIX rematch on Fox nonetheless posted by far the largest audience of the young 2025 NFL season.
The network said late Tuesday that it averaged 33.8 million viewers for the Philadelphia–Kansas City matchup, easily setting a new standard for the most-watched game through the first two weeks of the season and representing the most-watched Week 2 NFL game in league history.
That figure also surpassed the 28.3 million viewers who tuned in Sept. 4 on NBC for the league’s kickoff game between the Cowboys and Eagles. That audience could have been higher, but the game was disrupted by a 65-minute weather delay.
As with nearly all other NFL games this season, the robust total owes in part to Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel audience measurement process. That methodology, bringing in millions of additional data points from set-top boxes and smart TVs, is designed to provide a fuller view of audience behaviors and capture more of the content consumption that is already occurring.
The one NFL game that did not use Big Data + Panel—YouTube’s Sept. 5 game from Brazil between the Chiefs and Chargers—continues to draw sharp criticism from other network leaders.
“Just like YouTube, we will continue to revise those numbers up until we can no longer revise them anymore,” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks joked Tuesday at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit, referring to the streamer’s recent and hotly debated adjustment of its NFL audience.
Other superlatives from the Eagles-Chiefs game include the most-watched telecast of any kind in U.S. television since the record-setting Super Bowl LIX in February and Fox’s best-ever regular-season Sunday telecast.
The Chiefs, meanwhile, will have their status as the NFL’s most-watched team tested in the coming weeks after falling Sunday to 0–2, representing the team’s worst start in 11 years.
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