A 65-minute weather delay didn’t put too much of a damper on the NFL Kickoff deliveries, as NBC and Peacock averaged 28.3 million viewers for Thursday night’s Cowboys-Eagles opener.
Before a storm rolled into the Philadelphia area with 4:44 remaining in the third quarter, the opening salvo of NBC’s 20th season of Sunday Night Football had been on pace to average 31.6 million viewers—which would have been the biggest audience on record for the NFL’s annual table-setter. Per Nielsen, the broadcast peaked at 34.3 million viewers late in the second quarter.
The delay prevented NBC from topping last year’s record delivery for the analogous Ravens-Chiefs nail-biter, which averaged 29.2 million viewers across linear TV and streaming platforms. That said, any comparison to previous seasons is now necessarily of the apples-to-Apple Jacks® variety, as Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel currency has changed the methodology in which the ratings service counts the house.
The rollout of BDP—which includes measurement from set-top boxes and smart TVs across 45 million households and 75 million devices—coincides with the expansion of Nielsen’s out-of-home sample. As such, the audience data against which the NFL’s $5.2 billion of ad inventory is transacted is expected to coincide with across-the-board ratings boosts throughout the 2025-26 season.
By the time the weather disturbance had passed over the area and play resumed, it was 11:24 p.m. ET—just about when a standard SNF game wraps. The late return to the field was particularly impactful to the audience in the home team’s time zone, in which 48% of all U.S. TV households are situated.
All told, the flagship NBC broadcast averaged approximately 23.4 million viewers, while Peacock and various other digital platforms accounted for another 4.9 million streams.
It’s been a while since an NFL game was subjected to a ratings-eroding meteorological disruption, but such occurrences are hardly rare. On Sept. 10, 2017, Hurricane Irma slammed into the Florida Keys as a category 4 storm just hours before the league’s first Sunday 1 p.m. ET slate was about to kick off. Per Nielsen, the afternoon windows from eight years ago were down 13% versus the analogous lineup in 2016, as millions of large Florida markets were plunged into darkness … and untold scores of fans in adjacent states switched over to the Weather Channel and various news outlets.
The NFL viewership patterns returned to a relative state of normalcy in time for NBC’s 2017 SNF debut, a Giants-Cowboys matchup which averaged 24.4 million linear viewers. Dallas’ 19-3 rout of New York was up 6% compared to the year-ago Patriots-Cardinals broadcast (23.1 million).
If the top 100 list from 2024 is any indication, the Eagles’ 24-20 win on Thursday night should land among this year’s 25 most-watched broadcasts. And while NBC may have been somewhat shortchanged by its hour-long waiting game, the weather outage had no material impact on the performance guarantees the network made with its advertisers.
More to the point, the average deliveries for Sunday night’s head-spinning Ravens-Bills game should be sufficiently massive to overshadow the results from the Cowboys-Eagles showdown. Buffalo’s absolutely bonkers 41-40 victory over Baltimore can be summed up with a glance at the win-probability chart, which gave Josh Allen & Co. a 1.1% shot at success with 8:37 left in the fourth quarter—when the home team was down 40-25.
Per NFL data crunchers, only three of the 2,315 teams that had been trailing by 15 points in the final four minutes had managed to steal a victory before the Bills pulled it off on Sunday night. With Buffalo’s beyond-improbable feat now on the books, the historic winning percentage in such a scenario is now at 0.17%, up from the previous mark of 0.13%.
In keeping with the demands of processing the new currency, Nielsen isn’t expected to have Sunday’s NFL numbers ready for perusal until Wednesday afternoon. In the meantime, the over/under for NBC’s TV and streaming audience is 25 million viewers. Take the over.