NFL Media
A cast of familiar characters has helped keep the NFL's TV deliveries at full throttle.
A national television scheduled frontloaded with the Dallas Cowboys and Patrick Mahomes’ accelerated return from a season-ending knee injury in 2025 have conspired to get the NFL off to yet another hot start on the ratings charts.
Set to make six coast-to-coast broadcast appearances over the first seven weeks of the 2026-27 campaign, Dallas is already rewarding the league and its media partners for their indulgences. With three national windows under their belts, the Cowboys are averaging 25.93 million viewers per telecast, making them the top-drawing franchise as the season enters its second quarter. Mahomes’ Kansas City Chiefs are hot on the heels of Dallas, with an average delivery of 25.32 million viewers in three national windows.
The Chiefs also have bragging rights to the most-watched game of the young season, as CBS’ coverage of KC’s 30-27 victory over the Las Vegas Raiders scared up 28.45 million viewers on the afternoon of Oct. 4. This marks the largest Week 4 NFL audience since the Nielsen people meter era kicked off in 1988. (Naturally, the usual caveats about the introduction of out-of-home ratings measurement in 2020 and last year’s switch to the Big Data + Panel currency apply here.)
CBS aired Chiefs-Raiders in 79% of its markets, with affiliates in much of the western U.S. being fed either Miami-San Francisco or Seattle-Arizona.
Dallas, for its part, has laid claim to three of the top five NFL broadcasts to date, a slate that includes their Sept. 20 win over the Commanders (27.21 million viewers in Fox’s “America’s Game of the Week” window). The Cowboys also put up numbers (25.66 million viewers) against the Giants in the NBC’s first Sunday Night Football matchup, and helped set the NFL’s all-time record for an international game as their Week 3 showdown with the Ravens in Rio averaged 24.9 million on CBS.
While the overseas record makes for a nice bullet point, it’s worth noting that the International Series games generally have been remanded to 9:30 a.m. ET kickoffs on NFL Network. (Ravens-Cowboys marked the first time an NFL game staged on foreign soil was given the Sunday afternoon national-window treatment.) Aside from demanding that fans in the Pacific time zone set their alarms for an ungodly early start to their Sunday viewing slate, the International Series games have been hampered by NFL Network’s status as a basic-cable channel. Case in point: Last Sunday’s London opener featuring the Colts and Commanders scared up 4.99 million viewers, down 17.5% versus the analogous Vikings-Browns outing a year ago (6.04 million).
When the season began a month ago, Nielsen had NFL Network pegged at just 38.8 million subscribers, which translates to a penetration rate of 30.3% of the country’s 128.2 million TV households. By way of comparison, ESPN’s signal reaches 53.6 million pay-TV subscribers, or 41.8% of all U.S. TV homes, while the Big Four broadcast networks reach approximately 84.3 million homes. Per Nielsen, 19% of all stateside homes receive their TV signals from an over-the-air antenna, which is just shy of wired cable’s penetration (20.1%). The antenna penetration figure marks a steep uptick from 14.9% in February 2025.
Dallas is scheduled to appear in eight additional national windows before the regular season closes out, with only three 1 p.m. ET kickoffs slated between now and the Cowboys’ Week 14 bye week. The entire NFC East will be all but unavoidable this season, and with good reason: Each of the four teams represents one of the top 10 media markets, and together those DMAs are home to 17.06 million TV homes—or 13.3% of the national base. Heavying up on the Cowboys/Giants/Eagles/Commanders is already paying off, as Washington is the No. 3 biggest draw among teams with two or more national TV appearances (23.78 million viewers per window), while Big Blue is No. 4 (22.53 million) and a struggling Philly is holding down sixth place (21.47 million).
Season-to-date, the NFL is averaging 19.1 million viewers per window, down 3% from where things stood at this point in 2025. (Network execs and media buyers anticipated that deliveries would be flat for at least the first half of the season.) While no game has thus far broken the 30 million viewer mark—last season saw Fox ring up 32.66 million viewers with its Week 1 Eagles-Chiefs opener, which aired in 100% of its markets—that drought won’t last forever. Put it this way: If nobody manages to top 30 million by Week 9, the following week’s slate will feature San Francisco-Dallas on Fox, with 100% coverage.
While the Cowboys and Chiefs are the most popular teams on the national TV dial, the Patriots, Steelers and Bills run the show in the regional 1 p.m. ET window. The reigning AFC champs have headlined CBS’ early-afternoon slot twice, leading the network to an average draw of 17.29 million viewers, while Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers will have been tapped as the go-to squad in four of the first five single-headers on CBS and Fox. Through three games, Pittsburgh is helping the networks’ A-teams reach an average of 15.95 million viewers in their early single-header windows, a tally that includes CBS’ Week 3 mark of 17.71 million viewers. The Bills (15.74 million) have also been a featured act at 1 p.m., popping up as part of the primary draw in three single-headers thus far.
The early window often gets overlooked, but regional NFL offerings accounted for 10 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts of 2025. Those table-setters have played a significant role in putting CBS’ NFL deliveries on a torrid pace; per Nielsen, the Tiffany Network’s live game coverage is averaging 19.88 million viewers per week, up 9% versus the year-ago period.
Mahomes’ rapid recovery from last year’s ACL/LCL catastrophe is great news for Kansas City fans and the NFL’s TV/streaming partners, as he and the Chiefs are slated to pop up in as many as 12 national windows before the playoffs arrive. That said, CBS will face an interesting decision come Week 6, as the Chargers-Chiefs matchup that seemed destined to claim the network’s 4:25 p.m. ET national window may well be punted away in favor of a Bills-Raiders brawl in Vegas. While KC is must-see TV, the woeful 0-4 Chargers are nobody’s idea of a good time. Meanwhile, Buffalo’s Josh Allen remains one of the most watchable quarterbacks in the league (this despite his recent hiccups), and the 3-1 Raiders proved their mettle last weekend against their divisional rivals.
If the rehabbed Mahomes isn’t necessarily matching his eye-goggling 2018 production, he’s been getting a whole lot of help after he threads the needle. Newlywed Travis Kelce turned 37 on Monday, but you wouldn’t know it from his on-field performance; having already amassed 168 yards-after-catch, the veteran tight end ranks fourth among NFL receivers in the category. He’s also hauled in a pair of touchdown catches, putting him well ahead of last season’s pace (five) and nearly equaling his 2024 total (three).
The rebound by Mahomes’ favorite target coincides with KC’s snaring of Super Bowl LX MVP Kenneth Walker III, who leads the league with 537 rushing yards. That early ground mileage puts Walker on pace to churn out 2,282 yards for the entire 2026-27 campaign, which would snap Eric Dickerson’s single-season record of 2,105 yards across 16 games, set in 1984. While projecting offensive stats over an entire NFL season is admittedly a lunkheaded pursuit, there’s no question that the addition of Walker to the backfield has transformed the Chiefs’ offensive attack.
While the Chiefs add another dimension to their offense, the league generally could use a little tightening up on that side of the ball. Pre-snap penalties have been a blight on the fan experience, as the 65 delay-of-game calls are the most on record through the first four weeks of any NFL season. The refs have also flung their hankies for 177 false starts, the biggest tally in nearly 20 years. All told, the action has been interrupted by no fewer than 963 accepted penalties, the most since the data first began being tallied in 1978.
For advertisers, the NFL continues to be the only game in town. Per EDO’s analysis of last season’s commercial breaks, in-game NFL spots are about 73 times as effective as a standard TV buy, which is to say that a single ad in an NFL telecast delivers the impact of 73 buys on broadcast and cable prime. Season-to-date, NFL games have already generated an estimated $989 million in ad sales revenue, up from the year-ago $942 million, with representatives from the usual categories (theatrical movies/streaming, telco, insurance, restaurants, automotive, pharma) accounting for much of the messaging during the breaks.