​​There’s nothing like the NFL in U.S. television, and the league has affirmed that once again.

The NFL finished the 2025 regular season with a per-game viewership average of 18.7 million, up 10% from last year’s mark, the best such total since 1989, and the second-best figure on record. Unlike more modest audience increases in recent years, and even a 2.2% drop during the 2024 campaign, this season featured sizable, across-the-board boosts involving every broadcast window and every rights holder. 

Among the individual network totals:

• Amazon: The streamer generated a per-game viewership average of 15.33 million, up 16% from last year and the highest level in the 20-year history of Thursday Night Football on any network. The 2025 campaign featured a series of milestones for Amazon, including a Christmas Day audience of 21.06 million that set a company record during the regular season.
• CBS: The Paramount-led broadcaster had its best NFL regular season ever, averaging 21.3 million for all its games, up 11% from a year ago. The network’s schedule was highlighted by a regular-season NFL record of more than 57 million viewers for a Thanksgiving clash between the Chiefs and Cowboys. The late Sunday afternoon NFL window on CBS also averaged 25.8 million viewers, more than any program on U.S. television. 
• ESPN: The Disney-owned outlet posted its second-best season in 20 years airing Monday Night Football, and averaged 16.5 million viewers when including all of 23 NFL games, up 10% from last year. 
• Fox: The network averaged 19.6 million viewers per game for all of its NFL coverage, up 6% from last year and its best mark since 2015. Fox NFL Sunday also finished as the most-watched NFL pregame show for the 32nd straight year, averaging 4.4 million viewers.
• NBC: Sunday Night Football averaged 23.5 million viewers in total audience delivery, up 9% from 2024. A record eight SNF games averaged more than 25 million viewers. Not surprisingly, SNF is also on track to be the No. 1 show in U.S. prime time for a 15th consecutive year, by far the largest streak in TV history. 
• Netflix: In its second year with a Christmas doubleheader, the outlet set a league streaming record, averaging 27.5 million viewers for a late-afternoon game between the Lions and Vikings. 
• NFL Network: The league-controlled outlet averaged 6.2 million viewers for coverage of six international games, up 32% from 2024, and the most-watched set of international games on record. 
• YouTube: The Google-owned outlet averaged 19.7 million for a September game from Brazil between the Chiefs and Chargers, but it generated widespread controversy for its use of a non-accredited method to measure that viewership. 

Some of the viewership boosts owe to Nielsen methodology enhancements such as an expansion of out-of-home tabulation and the arrival of the Big Data + Panel measurement process. The NFL, however, has been insistent that its rising popularity is transcending those process improvements, particularly as it still has some issues with the agency. 

A heavily front-loaded schedule to begin the 2025 season also gave the league a strong boost at the outset of play, one that ultimately held throughout the season.

Even in a downbeat season for the Chiefs, who will miss the playoffs for the first time since 2014, the team dominated the list of the 10 most-watched games. Kansas City was in four of the top five broadcasts, including the historic Thanksgiving clash. The defending champion Eagles were part of three of the top 10. 

The wild-card round, featuring six teams not in last year’s postseason, begins Saturday.

All four head coaches of this season’s College Football Playoff semifinalists have something in common: Nick Saban—and deeper pockets because of him. 

Each coach still fighting for a national championship previously spent at least one season working as an assistant coach at Alabama during Saban’s 17-season stint in Tuscaloosa, which resulted in six national championships and nine SEC titles.

• Curt Cignetti, Indiana: Was part of Saban’s first coaching staff in Tuscaloosa, serving as wide receivers coach and recruiting coordinator from 2007 to 2010
• Dan Lanning, Oregon: Graduate assistant at Alabama for the 2015 season
• Pete Golding, Ole Miss: With the Crimson Tide from 2018 through 2021, first as co-defensive coordinator and inside linebackers coach, then as defensive coordinator
• Mario Cristobal, Miami: Assistant head coach, offensive line coach, and recruiting coordinator from 2013 to 2016, overlapping with Lanning for his lone season at Alabama

All four coaches were a part of a national-championship-winning staff under Saban. Now, each leading their own program, the quartet is among the highest-paid coaches in college football.

Cignetti’s new deal, just signed in October, pays him $11.6 million annually (and will likely come with a $1 million raise after Indiana’s Rose Bowl victory). Lanning is making $10.4 million this season at Oregon. Miami is paying Cristobal $8.3 million this season. And Golding’s first-year salary as Ole Miss head coach will be $6.8 million. 

And Georgia’s Kirby Smart, whose Bulldogs lost to Ole Miss in the CFP quarterfinals, had a longer tenure with Saban than any of the remaining coaches. Smart, the highest-paid coach in college football with a $13.2 million salary, was Alabama’s assistant head coach and defensive backs coach in 2007, and then defensive coordinator from 2008 to 2015, helping the Crimson Tide win four national championships.

Alabama paid Saban $11.4 million during his final season in 2023. 

Talk of the Town

Saban, 74, and his coaching disciples have plenty of mutual respect for one another.

“I remember him telling me where he was going, IUP, and thinking that’s a big drop from coaching in the SEC,” Saban told On3 of Cignetti leaving Alabama to coach Division II Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2011. “But he wanted to be a head coach. He was ready to be a head coach, and it tells you a lot about the belief he had in himself that he would take a job at that level at a place that hadn’t had great success.”

Cignetti said “everybody learned a lot” from Saban. “If you were serious about your career and wanted to be a head coach one day, you took great notes,” he said in a pre-CFP semifinal press conference.

When Lanning joined Alabama, he dropped down from being the defensive backs coach and co-recruiting coordinator at Sam Houston State to take a graduate assistant position. “When anybody asked me why, I said, ‘I’m going to get my doctorate in football.’ And that’s what I feel like working for Coach Saban,” he said ahead of the Ducks’ matchup with the Hoosiers.

Saban said Golding texted him after being promoted to head coach following Lane Kiffin’s departure. “Don’t worry about what people are thinking,” Saban said he told Golding during ESPN’s College GameDay. 

In September, before Miami became a CFP contender, Saban said Cristobal was the “perfect guy” for the Hurricanes job.

TNT Sports parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has rejected a second hostile takeover bid from Paramount, and it plans to continue with its separate merger deal with Netflix. 

Largely reiterating its prior rejection of the CBS Sports parent company, WBD said early Wednesday that the revised offer from Paramount and its CEO and chair David Ellison remains “inferior given significant risks, costs, and uncertainties compared to the Netflix merger.” WBD also said Paramount’s offer would be the largest leveraged buyout ever, and involve Paramount taking on debt and equity financing nearly seven times its total market capitalization. 

In part because of that, WBD said Paramount’s offer contains a much greater uncertainty of closing.

“The [Paramount] offer is not superior, or even comparable, to the Netflix merger,” WBD wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Paramount has repeatedly failed to submit the best proposal for WBD shareholders despite clear direction from WBD on both the deficiencies and potential solutions.”

Paramount had offered to buy all of WBD—including the sports and linear television assets—in a deal with an enterprise value of $108.4 billion. Instead, the $82.7 billion deal with Netflix will be focused on WBD’s studio and streaming businesses. 

WBD also plans to continue with a planned split of the company that will create Discovery Global, a new holding entity that would house TNT Sports. That split, and the Netflix deal, are slated to close in the latter half of 2026, and a new sports-centric streaming service is under development within TNT Sports and Discovery Global. 

New Financing, Same Result

After the initial rejection from WBD, Paramount had attempted to boost its bid, particularly the financing within it—including guaranteeing the backing from billionaire Larry Ellison, the father of David Ellison. Paramount, however, did not elevate the amount of its bid.

“The WBD board, management team, and our advisors have extensively engaged with Paramount and its representatives and provided it with explicit instructions on how to improve each of its offers,” WBD wrote. “Yet, Paramount has continued to submit offers that still include many of the deficiencies we previously repeatedly identified, none of which are present in the Netflix merger agreement.”

WBD also said that “certain fixed obligations that Paramount has incurred or may incur prior to closing, such as the multiyear programming and sports licensing deals, could further strain its financial condition” as a factor in the rejection.

Paramount did not immediately comment regarding the latest rejection. Spanning the time before WBD formally put itself up for sale and after, Paramount has made eight separate offers for the company. WBD, meanwhile, is bracing for a potential lawsuit from Paramount.

“WBD continues to be of the view that [Paramount] is a litigious counterparty, which raises concerns regarding the likelihood that the offer (or any related merger agreement) will be completed on the terms proposed,” the company said in a Wednesday filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. 

Editors’ note: RedBird IMI, in which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is the primary investor in Front Office Sports.