NFL Ratings Surge in September With Chiefs in Four of Top Five Games

The NFL retained its nine-year viewership high through Week 4 of the regular season, and the Chiefs took another notch away from the Cowboys as the league’s most-watched team.

In September, NFL games averaged 17.9 million viewers (not including the Week 1 Peacock exclusive), which is up 4% compared to the first four weeks of the 2023 season. The NFL was up 10% year over year after three weeks. That was its best average audience since 2015, which is still the case through four weeks.

The most-watched game of Week 4 was Kansas City’s 17–10 win over the Chargers, which drew 24.2 million viewers on CBS and booted Cowboys-Browns out of the five highest NFL audiences this season. All four Chiefs broadcasts are now in the top five. 

Cowboys-Ravens still holds the No. 3 spot with 27.3 million viewers. And it should be noted that Dallas was responsible for Amazon Prime Video’s record Thursday Night Football stream in Week 4, as 17.61 million people tuned in to the 20–15 win over the NFC East rival Giants.

Monday Night Special

The results are in from back-to-back weeks of Monday Night Football doubleheaders.

When those two-for-one prime-time spotlights take place on ABC and ESPN, neither game draws as large an audience as it would on its own, but a good metric to look at is the roughly two-hour window when the matchups with staggered starts overlap.

During Weeks 3 and 4, the average viewership during the overlapping portions of MNF games was 19.65 million. That’s down nearly 10% from two early-season MNF doubleheaders in 2023, which averaged 21.83 million viewers during their combined periods. 

This year’s doubleheaders featured Titans-Dolphins and Seahawks-Lions on Monday and Bills-Jaguars and Commanders-Bengals last week. Last year had Saints-Panthers and Steelers-Browns in Week 2, and Eagles-Buccaneers and Bengals-Rams in Week 3.