The NFL closed out 2023 with 93 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts on U.S. television, across all programming. That’s not much of a surprise given the dominant status of the league for years. But the still-rising media power of the NFL is in part the result of several key initiatives this past year that have paid off handsomely.
Super Bowl LVII last February and its average audience of 115.1 million viewers led the NFL’s 93 top-ranking games. That number is up from the NFL’s prior record of 82 on the 2022 list, and it’s way up from the 61 NFL games on the 2018 list.
So, what changed? The NFL in 2023 did not have competition from some major television draws, such as an Olympics or a U.S. presidential debate, and the top non-NFL broadcast last year was the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (No. 23), which drew an average of 28.5 million viewers to set its own event record. But the overall results still were fueled by a series of league efforts, executed along with its domestic TV partners. Such as:
- A heightened presence on Christmas Day, including a tripleheader of games involving Super Bowl contenders. That league scheduling decision resulted in banner ratings on the holiday.
- A 24% jump in Amazon’s average audience for Thursday Night Football, which set a streaming first by gaining two slots on the top 100 list. The first: a Nov. 30 Seattle Seahawks-Dallas Cowboys game that set an NFL streaming record with an average audience of 15.3 million and ranked 98th. And a Sept. 14 Minnesota Vikings-Philadelphia Eagles game ranked 100th with an average audience of 15.05 million. Amazon made a concerted effort to boost its audience in Year 2 of its exclusive TNF coverage with a series of new programming elements.
- An expanded role for ABC with ESPN’s Monday Night Football games, helping fuel a 33% boost in viewership, to an average of 17.1 million, the best in the game window’s ESPN era, which began in 2006. MNF showed up on the top 100 list 12 times. In addition to wanting to reach additional viewers with the broadcast exposures on ABC, the recent actors’ and writers’ strikes created a dearth of entertainment programming that MNF helped fill on the network.
- Further growth in the NFL’s established dominance on Thanksgiving, which once again included the year’s top regular season game of the year, with an average audience of 41.8 million for the Washington Commanders-Dallas Cowboys late afternoon game, ranking fifth on the top 100 list.
Altogether, it’s further evidence of the NFL’s clearly stated aim: to be everywhere it can with its 272 regular-season games and 13 playoff games.
