Week 1 of the NFL season has concluded. After a great deal of scrutiny, what stood out from the 16 game broadcasts? We explore what went right, what went wrong, and why many fans are upset about the (limited) ads running on NFL RedZone.
—Michael McCarthy, Eric Fisher, and Ryan Glasspiegel
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The NFL is back, kicking off Week 1 with a loaded slate that may have included the game of the year.
As my colleague Ryan Glasspiegel wrote on X/Twitter: “The NFL just hits like crack. There’s nothing like it.”
The Good:
NBC Sports got off to an incredible start via Sunday night’s telecast of Josh Allen and the Bills’ 41–40 comeback win over Lamar Jackson and the Ravens. The Bills’ late-game comeback was almost statistically impossible. With the Ravens holding a 40–25 lead with only 4:48 left in the fourth quarter, Baltimore had a 99.1% chance of victory, according to ESPN Analytics. But you have to play until the clock reads zero, especially with reigning MVP Josh Allen under center for the Bills.
The game featured a duel between the league’s last two MVPs. NBC’s broadcast team of Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth brought their A game.
Collinsworth said powerful Ravens running back Derrick Henry simply “embarrasses” would-be tacklers like safety Cole Bishop of the Bills. “Watch what happens when you try to take on the big guy Derrick Henry. He just sizes you up and throws that left jab,” noted Collinsworth as viewers saw the 6-foot-2, 252-pound Henry stiff-arm Bishop to the turf. Then Tirico put a bow on what viewers witnessed. “1 and 2 in the MVP voting. It’s one of those games you feel like the guy who’s got the ball last wins. And they weren’t gonna let Lamar Jackson get it. And Josh Allen held onto it,” he said. “If you’ve never seen a game like that before, you’re right. That’s the first 41–40 final score in the 106-year history of the National Football League.”
After a rocky first season in the booth for Fox Sports, Tom Brady seemed more relaxed during his call of the Commanders’ 21–6 win over the Giants. The seven-time Super Bowl winner’s best moment came when he noted he always liked to keep a timeout in his back pocket for a last-second field goal. That proved prescient when the lack of a timeout prevented Washington from kicking an easy field goal at the end of the first half. “Big mistake there by the Commanders,” Brady said. Brady also correctly predicted an intentional grounding penalty against Commanders QB Jayden Daniels. I also liked an enthusiastic Brady dropping a John Madden–like “BOOM” on viewers when rookie Giants running back Cam Skattebo repeatedly bowled over tacklers. “When you watch film study, believe me, everybody on the offense is going to be loving watching Skattebo do that to the linebackers on the other side of the ball,” he said.
CBS analyst J.J. Watt showed impressive chemistry with play-by-play partner Ian Eagle, which bodes well for the network’s new, No. 2 broadcast team. The future Hall of Famer even had his own “Romostradamus” moment, correctly predicting a Justin Fields bootleg for a Jets TD. “There it is!” noted Watt. It’s very important for ex-players turned game-callers to make a good first impression. Former Cowboys tight end Jason Witten, for example, had an awful start on ESPN’s Monday Night Football—and never lived it down. Right now, Watt is off to a great start with viewers and critics alike.
Peyton and Eli Manning started fast on Monday night’s ManningCast, with a loaded guest lineup that included Saquon Barkley, Randy Moss, and Bill Murray. But the highlight was Eli reporting that Peyton hand-wrote two letters inviting Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native, to appear on the Monday Night Football alt-cast. “I couldn’t close the Pope. But I made the effort. That’s the kind of effort we make here at ESPN2,” noted Peyton Manning.
For what went wrong with Week 1 broadcasts, including dissatisfaction over ads on NFL RedZone, you can read Michael McCarthy’s full column here.
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Amanda Perobelli/Reuters via Imagn Images
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YouTube drew a global average audience of 17.3 million for its live coverage of the NFL’s game Friday in Brazil between the Chiefs and Chargers, a somewhat underwhelming number that failed to meet initial expectations of setting a league streaming record.
The figure, including an average-minute audience of 16.2 million in the U.S. and 1.1 million elsewhere, does represent a 14% improvement in domestic viewership from the 14.2 million in the U.S. who tuned in last year on Peacock for the league’s initial game in São Paulo between the Eagles and Packers. The NBCUniversal-owned Peacock, however, is a subscription-based service, while the game on Google’s YouTube was available for free to a worldwide audience.
Further lifting hopes for the YouTube game was the presence of the Chiefs, the league’s top viewership draw. Kansas City and Los Angeles played a competitive contest, with the Chargers prevailing 27–21.
Despite all that, the Christmas 2024 doubleheader on Netflix that averaged more than 24 million viewers remains the NFL high-water mark for streaming. The Chiefs-Chargers game, however, did set a company record for the most concurrent viewers of a livestream on YouTube.
The YouTube results, meanwhile, were not part of Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel audience measurement methodology and instead were the result of a custom process—a situation that rankled many other networks, including Fox and ESPN. The situation there largely was one of timing, as YouTube did not complete an extended auditing and integration process with Nielsen for first-party streaming data before the game.
More Pushback
That lack of full inclusion into the Big Data + Panel also means the Brazil game was the first in the NFL’s 2025 regular season to have a publicly released audience number, beating the Thursday night kickoff game between the Cowboys and Eagles.
“Not the same approach as the rest of us, nor [Media Rating Council] accredited. Conclusion … their rating is not a fair comp,” tweeted ESPN SVP of research Flora Kelly on Friday.
Kelly reiterated that sentiment in a supplemental comment on Monday.
“With no transparency into the methodology I have no idea what these numbers mean,” she tweeted. “That’s the problem with an approach like this and why clear and transparent methodology matters.”
Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill then questioned why YouTube did not complete that data integration process with Nielsen, something expected to take about eight weeks.
“This game was announced four months ago,” Mulvihill tweeted. “What would have been sufficient time?”
Front Office Sports queried Nielsen on the same issue last week, and has yet to receive a response.
Friday’s game reached more than 230 countries and territories, YouTube said. The pregame show, featuring a mix of NFL legends and YouTube creators, averaged 2.4 million viewers, while the postgame show garnered 5.9 million.
The rare placement of an NFL game on a Friday night again took advantage of a loophole in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, aimed in part at protecting high school and college football. This maneuver will not be repeated next year, however, as the September 2026 calendar falls quite differently.
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Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports
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Fox CEO and executive chair Lachlan Murdoch has prevailed in a long-running intrafamily dispute for future control of the Murdoch family media empire, providing a key dose of certainty and stability for sports leagues and investors.
An agreement reached Monday in a Nevada court proceeding will see three of family patriarch Rupert Murdoch’s other children—Elisabeth, James, and Prudence—gain about $1.1 billion each in return for their personal holdings in Fox Corp. and News Corp. The family drama, resolved through a complex series of financial transactions, furthered the deep parallels between the fictional television series Succession and the real-world conflicts among the Murdochs.
More substantively, though, the deal solidifies until at least 2050 the Fox status quo, with Lachlan Murdoch continuing to lead a sprawling set of holdings that includes Fox Sports. Politically conservative like his father, Lachlan Murdoch is already well-known to most major U.S. sports leagues and conferences, and he has been directly involved in most of the network’s key sports rights deals.
That will be a critical factor as over the next several years, Fox will have a series of rights up for renewal. Among them:
- FIFA: Fox holds the U.S. rights to next year’s FIFA men’s World Cup, an event to be held in North America. Within that, there is a fast-growing relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and FIFA president Gianni Infantino that has deep political symmetry with the right-leaning Fox News. The network is part of an ongoing tender process for U.S. rights to the 2030 tournament and beyond, but faces substantial competition from a mix of other linear broadcasters and streamers. Rupert Murdoch, however, recently attended the final of the FIFA Club World Cup in New Jersey with Infantino.
- MLB: Fox has been a key part of the league’s national media presence for nearly 30 years, and it enlarged its baseball presence this year with coverage of key events such as the recent MLB Speedway Classic. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, however, intends to rework the sport’s media footprint substantially in 2028, when all the league’s national-level deals expire, including Fox’s.
- NFL: The Fox America’s Game of the Week late Sunday afternoon showcase was the league’s most-watched game window last year. It’s a virtual lock, though, that the NFL will exercise an option to reopen most of its domestic deals after the 2029 season, four years early.
- Big Ten: The network’s rights deal with the power conference expires in 2030, and Fox is now at the center of a rising college football broadcasting rivalry with ESPN. As college sports continue to change at historic levels but still deliver some of the biggest non-NFL audiences anywhere, Fox will want to preserve its strong position here. Another rights deal with the Big 12 runs to 2031.
Lachlan Murdoch, meanwhile, has also been a key figure in pushing the network to a more digitally focused strategy, one that includes the recent debut of the Fox One streaming service.
Analysts now expect him to become more active in reshaping the company with the family control issues settled.
“Now that Lachlan Murdoch has cemented control in a post-Rupert world, we would not be surprised to see an increased level of aggressiveness around [mergers and acquisitions],” wrote LightShed Partners in a research note. “While Fox bought back $1.25 billion of stock in 2025, with the company dramatically outperforming its peers, the company is sitting on considerable balance-sheet firepower.”
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Great news for fans of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption: A source confirmed to Front Office Sport that cohosts Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon have signed contract extensions to continue doing the show. ESPN announced the deals on Tuesday. The three-year extensions were first reported by John Ourand of Puck News.
There was some speculation that the 77-year-old Kornheiser and 66-year-old Wilbon might move on from their show of 24 years when their current deals expire. But PTI, which debuted in 2001, is still one of ESPN’s biggest hits. It’s even more important now since its longtime lead-in, Around the Horn, was canceled in May after 23 years.
There was also talk ESPN might extend the half-hour PTI to an hour to take up the 5 p.m. ET window formerly claimed by ATH. But that’s not happening, said the source. Instead, ESPN will continue to air a 5 p.m. edition of SportsCenter before it decides on a permanent replacement for ATH.
Tuned In readers welcomed the news Monday night. “Thankful. You CAN NOT take @AroundtheHorn and @PTI from me in the same year,” wrote NevaRWilliams on X/Twitter. Alex Bowers added on X/Twitter: “The only production worth keeping @espn alive for! Wilbon & Kornheiser are timeless treasures.”
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- Ryan Clark and Peter Schrager are making peace. The two ESPN analysts, who clashed on live TV Friday, were both on Monday’s NFL Live from Chicago, where they fist-bumped on the air. Clark posted an apology to Schrager on Friday.
- Fox News host Sean Hannity has offered to set up a meeting between ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and President Donald Trump. “I’ll show up anytime he’s ready,” said Smith.
- Rex Ryan went after Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel on ESPN’s Get Up on Monday: “McGenius guy or whatever the hell he is, nerd boy. Their team has no respect for their coach, they play like that … they’re soft, every part of their football team.”
- During NBC’s Football Night in America before Sunday Night Football, ProFootballTalk founder Mike Florio took a jab at commercials on NFL RedZone.
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28.3 million
That was the average viewership for the season-opening NBC Sports telecast of Cowboys-Eagles on Thursday night. That made it the second-most-watched NFL kickoff game. Before a 65-minute weather delay due to lightning, the game was tracking to average 31.9 million viewers, which would have set the record. The audience peaked at 34.3 million viewers in the second quarter.
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Has Tom Brady improved as a broadcaster from last season to this one?
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Friday’s result: 63.9% of respondents said the idea of ads on “NFL RedZone” bothers them.
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