Washington Commanders running back Rachaad White
Credit: Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images
Overall, networks fared slightly better in Week 2 of the NFL season than in Week 1, based on historical viewership comparisons.
Fox Sports earned the most-watched game of the young NFL season with its late-afternoon tilt between the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Commanders. The telecast, which went to 80 percent of markets across the country (with Dolphins-49ers and Seahawks-Cardinals accounting for the other 20 percent), averaged 27.2 million viewers. The window was down 20 percent from last year’s Week 2 national window game, a Super Bowl rematch between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs on Fox, which averaged 33.8 million viewers. However, it was up eight percent over Fox’s 2025 season-long average in the late-afternoon window.
CBS had perhaps the week’s most impressive superlative to tout. The network’s singleheader window, which primarily featured the New England Patriots’ rout of the Pittsburgh Steelers, averaged 19.3 million viewers, marking the most-watched singleheader window on CBS since 1989. Viewership was up 29 percent versus last year’s Week 2 singleheader.
On Sunday night, a thrilling overtime finish between the Chiefs and Indianapolis Colts averaged 24.3 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, marking the most-watched Week 2 Sunday Night Football game since 2015. NBC’s streaming viewership is now measured through Nielsen rather than Adobe Analytics, making the network’s data fully comparable with its competitors’. The audience for the game peaked at 27.4 million viewers in the 9:15 p.m. ET quarter-hour.
Wrapping up the week, ESPN averaged 19.4 million viewers for Monday Night Football between the New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams, despite Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart going down with an injury in the first quarter. Even though the game got out of hand late, it was ESPN’s most-watched Week 2 game since it began airing the Monday package in 2006. Of course, many of those years do not include an ABC simulcast, which boosts viewership significantly. The ManningCast on ESPN2 continues its downward trend. Viewership for the altcast fell to just 661,000 viewers in Week 2, down about six percent versus its Week 1 audience.
Of course, this is only the second year Nielsen has measured viewership with its Big Data + Panel methodology, which has tended to lift audience figures for live sports. It’s also the first year Nielsen has implemented its new co-viewing measurement system, which lifted sports viewership even further during a pilot program earlier this year but has produced mixed results so far after its official rollout.
Regardless, these figures tend to paint a stronger picture than the NFL’s Week 1 slate, which saw some year-over-year declines. It’s too early in the season to make any true assessment on the state NFL viewership, other than it remains the strongest programming on television by a mile and shows no signs of slowing down.