Following a record-setting presentation of the Olympic Games Paris 2024, NBC Sports is preparing for the start of the football season with four consecutive nights of prime time football taking place next month. The action commences on Thursday, Sept. 5 with the NFL Kickoff Game between the back-to-back defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens, a rematch of the 2023 AFC Championship Game, on NBC and Peacock.
The Sunday Night Football broadcast team of Mike Tirico, Cris Collinsworth and Melissa Stark is expected to be on the call for that matchup. This broadcast property finished as prime time television’s No. 1 program in all key metrics for a 13th consecutive year, averaging a total audience delivery of 21.4 million viewers during the regular season.
One day later, Peacock will exclusively present an NFL game from São Paulo, Brazil between the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles, a showdown that could build off momentum the OTT streaming platform established in these presentations earlier in the year. Peacock was the exclusive home of the AFC Wild Card Game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins, which reached an average minute audience of 23 million viewers to become the most-streamed NFL contest in history. In addition to earning the distinction for the largest internet event, a study from Antenna discovered that 71% of the users who purchased Peacock to watch the game remained subscribers seven weeks later.
The Big Ten Saturday Night broadcast team of play-by-play announcer Noah Eagle and analyst Todd Blackledge will be on the call for the matchup. Eagle and Blackledge worked together to call two NFL games last season – a regular-season matchup in Week 16 and one of the AFC Wild Card games in the postseason. The duo will be joined by sideline reporter Kaylee Hartung, who served in the role for the aforementioned Dolphins-Chiefs AFC Wild Card Game last year and across Thursday Night Football games on Amazon’s Prime Video.
The Packers-Eagles game is indicative of the third NFL matchup exclusive to Peacock, which has 33 million subscribers according to the latest Comcast earnings report. This matchup will be available to watch on NBC stations in the competing teams’ cities and available on mobile devices through NFL+. Peacock will also stream all Sunday Night Football games and editions of Football Night in America this season, along with the return of the Peacock Sunday Night Football Final.
Following the Peacock exclusive matchup on Friday, Sept. 6, Big Ten Saturday Night will make its season debut with Colorado visiting Nebraska at 7:30 p.m. EST. To conclude the weekend, NBC and Peacock will present the season debut of Sunday Night Football as the Los Angeles Rams face the Detroit Lions in an NFC showdown with kickoff scheduled for 8:20 p.m. EST.
