The NFL still opened the season with a massive audience, but the league’s latest Kickoff number came with a clear catch: the crowd was smaller than last year’s.
NBC and Peacock averaged 25.1 million viewers for Wednesday’s Patriots-Seahawks rematch, a total that would overwhelm nearly anything else on television. Even so, it marked a four-year low for Kickoff night and came in 12 percent behind last season’s Cowboys-Eagles opener, which drew 28.3 million. That makes it the weakest regular-season opener since 2022.
The game itself didn’t do much to help the number. Seattle pulled out a 13-10 win in a slog, Sam Darnold exited after six plays because of a hip injury, and Drake Maye threw three interceptions for the Patriots.
A.J. Brown also went down, leaving New England’s night even uglier when he suffered an ankle injury.
There were still bright spots in the data. The broadcast peaked at 27.4 million viewers between 9 and 9:15 p.m.
ET, and the 18-49 demo reached a five-year high for an opener. The league also cleared 25 million for a fourth straight Kickoff game.
This was only the second time the NFL has staged Kickoff on a Wednesday; the previous Wednesday opener came in 2012. Even with that unusual setup, this year’s audience topped that older mark by about five percent. It still fell short of recent Thursday openers that featured the Chiefs or Cowboys.
The audience split in two directions: total viewership dipped, while younger viewers showed up in stronger numbers. That leaves the NFL in its familiar spot as the biggest draw in American TV, with only last year’s World Series Game 7 topping this Kickoff audience among recent sports events.
There was also a new wrinkle behind the numbers. Nielsen changed the way it counts viewers this year, combining device data with traditional household panels. That shift began two weeks before the NFL opener, and it has already made the league uneasy.
NFL head of data and analytics Paul Ballew addressed the change last month. “We don’t have enough impact data to fully assess,” Ballew said.
“We’re still trying to make sense of it. We’re still trying to make sense of some of the logic behind some of the methodological changes.”
He was even more direct after that. “From our initial impact, it looks like a negative for sports,” Ballew said.
“On the other side, co-viewing or partial co-viewing implementation is a positive.” He also called the rollout “a misstep on Nielsen’s part.”
The NBC broadcast drew its own criticism, with viewers going after Cris Collinsworth for talking through the Darnold injury and revisiting Super Bowl points during the game. The opener may not have matched last year’s number, but it still delivered a giant audience. The bigger story is the drop.
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