Coinciding with longstanding tradition, the Dallas Cowboys hosted the annual Thanksgiving Day game from AT&T Stadium as the franchise welcomed the rival New York Giants for an NFC East matchup. Even though both teams have struggled to collect victories through the first two-thirds of the year, FOX Sports averaged its largest audience of the NFL season on its live game broadcast of the action. Data from Nielsen Media Research and Adobe Analytics demonstrates that an average of 38.8 million viewers watched the contest, the fourth most-watched NFL Thanksgiving Day game and fifth most-watched NFL regular-season game on record.
Entering the bout, both teams were without their quarterbacks who started in their opening week matchups. Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott was out of action due to a season-ending hamstring injury, while the Giants released quarterback Daniel Jones shortly after the team benched him. Nonetheless, the Cowboys-Giants broadcast peaked with approximately 41.3 million viewers tuning in during the 6 to 6:15 p.m. quarter-hour as the Cowboys secured a 27-20 victory. The lead NFL on FOX broadcast team, composed of play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt, analyst Tom Brady and sideline reporters Erin Andrews and Tom Rinaldi, called the action and will broadcast Super Bowl LIX to conclude the NFL Playoffs in February.
Although the showdown was the most-watched game of the regular season thus far, it represents a decline from the previous year when the Cowboys’ game against the Washington Commanders averaged 41.4 million viewers on CBS. The Cowboys and Giants last met on Thanksgiving Day in 2022 where the game averaged 42.06 million viewers, marking the most-watched NFL game on the holiday in recorded history.
This year’s contest is up 15% from the NFL on FOX Thanksgiving broadcast last season, which was an NFC North tilt between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers from Lambeau Field. The 29-22 victory for the Packers averaged 33.7 million viewers and was indicative of the most-watched early NFL game on Thanksgiving Day in history.
NFL games broadcast on Thanksgiving Day this season amassed a viewership record, averaging a collective 34.2 million viewers between the three matchups with a total unduplicated audience of 141 million. The metric marked a second consecutive year in which the league and its broadcast partners surpassed previous record-setting benchmarks. Prior to the Giants-Cowboys matchup, the Week 11 game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills attained the highest average viewership with 31.2 million tuning in on CBS.
As a whole, NFL broadcasts have averaged 17.5 million viewers per game, the highest total through Week 12 since 2015. Moreover, NFL games have secured 47 spots within the top 50 most-watched shows on television since the beginning of the 2024 season, excluding international games on NFL Network and broadcasts on Peacock and ESPN+.
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