Usually, NBC’s Sunday Night Football dominates the NFL ratings and dwarfs all other games on the schedule. That wasn’t the case this week. America’s Game of the Week in the late window on FOX topped NBC.
More than 22.6 million viewers tuned into the network for the late window. It was headlined by the Rams’ 34-24 win over the reigning Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers. By comparison, Sunday Night Football drew 20.2 million viewers on NBC.
The news isn’t bad necessarily for NBC. Would the network liked to have topped FOX? Of course, but executives are still celebrating the performance of Green Bay’s last second victory over San Francisco. It gave Sunday Night Football an audience of more than 20 million for the third consecutive week. It is the first time since 2016 that NBC can say that.
The trend is likely to continue in Week 4. No regular season game has ever seen the kind of hype that Tom Brady’s return to New England is receiving right now. Plenty have predicted it could be the highest rated regular season game in NFL history.
