After double-digit increases in its regular-season and wild-card playoff round ratings, the NFL is looking for another large bump in ratings during this weekend’s division round.
The league and Nielsen said last weekend’s six wild-card games averaged 32 million viewers, a 13% jump from last year. It was also the most-watched opening weekend of the NFL playoffs since the field expanded to 14 teams in the 2020 season.
Overall, it was the most-watched wild-card round since the 2015 season and the fifth highest since average viewer numbers started being tracked in 1988.
Five of the games saw increases compared to the same time frames a year ago while the sixth game was even.
The regular season averaged 18.7 million viewers per game, a 10% increase. It also was the second-highest average on record.
Some of the increase can be attributed to a change in the way viewers are counted. Nielsen began using its Big Data + Panel methodology for all events last September with the start of the current television season.
Earlier this year, Nielsen began measuring out-of-home viewers for all states but Hawaii and Alaska, along with including data from smart TVs along with cable and satellite set-top boxes.
Nielsen previously measured only the top 44 media markets, which covered 65% of the country.
“It was a great weekend of football all around,” said Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution. “Every year, there’s a new set of stars and players emerging. You have (New England’s) Drake Maye, who’s a potential MVP and on the other end you have an established star like (Los Angeles Rams QB) Matthew Stafford, who may be the other MVP favorite playing a heck of a game with the fourth-quarter comeback.”
Last year’s four divisional matchups averaged 37.1 million viewers. The record for the NFL’s second weekend of the playoffs is 40 million, set two years ago. That was led by the Kansas City-Buffalo matchup, which averaged 50.4 million, making it the most watched divisional or wild-card game on record.
Fox averaged 37.5 million for the Green Bay-San Francisco Saturday night divisional matchup two years ago, which was the most-watched Saturday NFL playoff game on record.
The 49ers will face the Seattle Seahawks on Saturday night, which drew some criticism in some quarters because they played in Philadelphia in the late afternoon Sunday window and have a short week. Meanwhile, the Rams and Chicago Bears both played on Saturday.
The Rams and Bears though will close the weekend on Sunday night on NBC.
The last time at least one team didn’t have a short week between the wild-card and divisional rounds was the 2018 season.
“We have teams every week playing from Monday night to Sunday,” Schroeder said. “That’s just the way it breaks every year, which is some team on Sunday has to play Saturday the next weekend. We work very hard with our football ops team and making sure we’re starting with what’s competitively fair.”
