If the Sunday afternoon NFL national window, shared by CBS and Fox, is the straw that lifts the league’s ratings, the downstream impact of these signature games is still largely overlooked. When the usual crowd of 25 million fans settles in as the shadows lengthen on the East Coast, virtually everything else on the tube takes a back seat until NBC’s nightcap begins around 8:20 p.m. ET — so much so that the lead actor goes out of the big afternoon game has quietly established itself as one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in primetime.
Last weekend, Fox was very fortunate to draw the Chiefs and 49ers in the 4:20 PM period, and with an average draw of 27.08 million viewers, Kansas City’s 28-18 win over their Super Bowl LVIII opponents now stands as the best. the third most-watched NFL broadcast of the season. Aside from the allure of all those bold names lining up to repeat the league’s most scrutinized headline title — including simulcasts on Nickelodeon and Univision, CBS terrified 123.71 million viewers on the night of Feb. 11, from who recorded 25.94 million. the action in an out-of-home environment: Fox broadcast the rematch in 100% of its markets.
While the game wasn’t exactly exciting (before Brock Purdy scored a touchdown with 1:08 left, the Chiefs were cruising), a crowd that size takes some time to disperse. According to Nielsen, 19.67 million fans stuck with six minutes of post-gun coverage, and the 27-minute studio wrap averaged 11.94 million as NBC’s Football night in America slowly started to draw in the early Jets-Steelers crowd. For Fox’s ad sales team, however, the evening wasn’t over yet; at 8:00 PM ET the network’s new animated series, Universal basic guysaveraged 3.87 million viewers during NBC and CBS’ pregame festivities 60 minutes.
If these deliveries aren’t necessarily going to result in quite a few double-takes, keep in mind that this largely uncelebrated primetime cartoon barely managed to spook 667,000 impressions in its previous first showing on October 6. (The October 13 episode was pre-empted by Game 1 of the National League Championship Series.) That earlier episode didn’t have the luxury of an NFL lead-in, as CBS struggled with the Packers-Rams showcase; once it got cracked again in a post-football slot, Universal basic guys the audience grew by no less than 480%. In fact, the show’s weekly gain (+3.21 million viewers) is only slightly less than the average of the 52 broadcast primetime entertainment programs at this stage of the 2024-2025 TV season (3.38 million).
As you’d reasonably expect, the show’s demos rose right alongside overall deliveries. After serving just 254,771 adults aged 18 to 49 on October 6, the most recent broadcast of UBG increased its ranking among viewers in the dollar demo by 474%, with an average draw of 1.46 million adults under 50. That’s nearly three times the average for all primetime non-sports series (494,634).
Of course, that America’s game of the week boost is limited to weeks where Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady call the action in the coast-to-coast window. On Sunday afternoon, CBS gets another crack at the big NFL window, with a Bears-Commanders battle [knock on wood] the league’s top two draft picks: Chicago’s Caleb Williams and Washington’s Jayden Daniels. We’re knocking the plank here because Daniels suffered a rib injury in last week’s win over the Panthers; In his absence, Marcus Mariota has taken the first-team reps, and Commanders head coach Dan Quinn is playing things by ear.
In any case, Bears-Commanders is ready for the previously scheduled Eagles-Bengals game, which was cut to a 1 p.m. start earlier this month. If Daniels plays and CBS does a big number — the 4:20 timeframe is currently averaging 24.95 million viewers per week, up 5% from 23.69 million a year ago — it will 60 minutes‘ turn to take advantage of the NFL lead-in. Not that CBS’s venerable newsmagazine needs much attention; now in its 57th season on the Eye Network, 60 minutes trails only the NFL’s Sunday and Monday primetime packages as the most-watched and highest-rated late-night program on the dial.
(For what it’s worth, the NFC North’s who’da-thunk-it season — but for the Bears, every team in the division already has five wins … and Chicago is 4-2 — is an extraordinary windfall for the NFL and its media partners, especially given the questionable state of the major NFC East market. As Chicago goes, so goes the nation’s third-largest market, home to 3.66 million TV households, or just under 3% of it. total. US base.)
For his part, Universal basic guys will revert back to underperformer status until Nov. 3, when it will emerge from Lions-Packers. The disparity between episodes that air America’s game of the week and those who catch repeats or other regional programming are hard to miss; through three non-NFL dates, the show is averaging 676,333 viewers on TV, while the trio of episodes that benefited from a football boost averaged 3.08 million viewers.
The NFL lift on Sunday is critical to Fox’s non-sports offerings, as the network continues to struggle on nights when sports content is sparse. Through Oct. 21, Fox has the dubious honor of airing each of the six lowest-rated entertainment programs on the Big Four, a dog’s breakfast of cooking competition series and low-budget dramas that collectively reach an average of 237,000 adults ages 18 to 49. Ten years ago, Empire bringing in 6.48 million dollar demo members every week.
Of course, the headlong erosion of the linear TV habit was one of the reasons why Fox then got out of the expensive scripted game. But as Sunday’s primetime numbers show, there’s still plenty of opportunity to grow the non-sports audience as long as the big boys in the pads do the heavy lifting. And while NBC’s audience goes to bed after Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth sign in for the night, the early birds still have three hours to play. Aside from the nosebleeds and sky-high ad rates (a 30-second unit in a 4:20 game can fetch as much as $850,000 each), CBS and Fox are both getting an awful lot of mileage out of their national NFL slots.
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