Sunday’s matchup between the Chicago Bears and the Buffalo Bills played out as one of the most non-competitive games of the 2025 preseason thus far. But the game was an overwhelming success for Fox nonetheless.
It was one way traffic for the Bears on Sunday, coming away with a 38-0 victory. And this was largely due to the fact that the Bears came out of the gate with their first-string offense against a Buffalo team playing backups.
Still, it seems as if there was plenty of buzz around how Caleb Williams would look in his debut game in the Ben Johnson offseason.
In a post on X, the Fox Sports PR team shared the viewership numbers for the game, which averaged 5.1 million viewers for the one-sided rout. This marks the most-watched preseason broadcast for the network since 2021, when the network hosted the Hall of Fame Game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
This past Sunday, 5.1 million viewers tuned in to @NFLONFOX‘s preseason coverage of the @ChicagoBears 38-0 victory over the @BuffaloBills — delivering the network’s most-watched NFL preseason game since 2021. 📈 pic.twitter.com/O6UX2SVYWY
— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) August 19, 2025
Sunday’s game also serves as a small year-over-year increase from the network’s lone national preseason broadcast in 2024, a game between the San Francisco 49ers and the New Orleans Saints in the same time slot, which brought in an average of 4.6 million viewers.
While Fox experienced a slight decrease in year-over-year viewership in 2024, they did have the luxury of airing Super Bowl LIX, which ended up breaking the record as the most-watched Super Bowl ever, with 127.7 million viewers tuning in across the Fox family of networks (Fox, Telemundo, Fox Deportes, the Fox Sports App, and Tubi).
Sunday’s broadcast is a positive sign that fans are again craving football in their lives, especially given the fact that the game itself wasn’t all that entertaining.