NFL Gives Fox, CBS a Crucial Sunday Afternoon TV Afterglow

If the national Sunday afternoon NFL window shared by CBS and Fox is the straw that stirs the league’s TV ratings drink, the downstream impact of these signature games is still largely overlooked. When the usual crowd of 25 million fans settles in as the shadows start lengthening on the East Coast, pretty much everything else on the tube takes a back seat until NBC’s nightcap kicks off at around 8:20 p.m. ET—so much so that the lead-out from the big afternoon game has quietly established itself as one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in primetime.

Last weekend, Fox had the great good fortune to have drawn the Chiefs and 49ers in the 4:20 p.m. window, and with an average draw of 27.08 million viewers, Kansas City’s 28-18 win over their Super Bowl LVIII opponents now stands as the season’s third most-watched NFL broadcast. Aside from the allure of all those bold-print names lining up to rehash the league’s most scrutinized title tilt—including simulcast deliveries via Nickelodeon and Univision, CBS scared up 123.71 million viewers on the night of Feb. 11, of whom 25.94 million took in the action in an out-of-home setting—Fox aired the rematch in 100% of its markets.

While the game wasn’t particularly close (before Brock Purdy ran it in for a touchdown with 1:08 left on the clock, the Chiefs were cruising), a crowd that size takes some time to disperse. Per Nielsen, 19.67 million fans stuck around through six minutes of post-gun coverage, and the 27-minutes studio wrap averaged 11.94 million as NBC’s Football Night in America slowly started luring in the early Jets-Steelers crowd. For Fox’s ad sales team, however, the night wasn’t over; at 8 p.m. ET the network’s new animated series, Universal Basic Guys, averaged 3.87 million viewers opposite NBC’s pregame festivities and CBS’ 60 Minutes.

If those deliveries aren’t necessarily the sort of thing that’ll lead to a whole lot of double takes, bear in mind that this largely uncelebrated primetime cartoon scarcely managed to scare up 667,000 impressions during its previous first-run showing on Oct. 6. (The Oct. 13 installment was pre-empted by Game 1 of the National League Championship Series.) That earlier episode didn’t have the luxury of an NFL lead-in, as CBS had dibs on the Packers-Rams showcase; as soon as it got another crack at a post-football slot, Universal Basic Guys grew its audience by a whopping 480%. In fact, the show’s week-to-week gain (+3.21 million viewers) is only slightly less than what the 52 broadcast primetime entertainment programs are currently averaging through this stage of the 2024-25 TV season (3.38 million).

As one might reasonably expect, the show’s demos rose right alongside its overall deliveries. After managing just 254,771 adults 18-49 on Oct. 6, the most recent airing of UBG boosted its standing among viewers in the dollar demo by 474%, with an average draw of 1.46 million adults under 50. That’s nearly three times the average for all primetime non-sports series (494,634).

Naturally, that America’s Game of the Week boost is limited to weeks when Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady are calling the action in the coast-to-coast window. Come Sunday afternoon, CBS gets another crack at the big NFL window, with a Bears-Commanders battle featuring [knock on wood] the league’s two top draft picks in Chicago’s Caleb Williams and Washington’s Jayden Daniels. We’re rapping the planks here because Daniels sustained an injury to his ribs during last week’s win over the Panthers; in his absence, Marcus Mariota has been taking first-team reps in practice, and Commanders head coach Dan Quinn is playing things by ear.

In any event, Bears-Commanders is in for the previously scheduled Eagles-Bengals matchup, which was busted down to a 1 p.m. start earlier this month. If Daniels plays and CBS does a big number—the 4:20 window is currently averaging 24.95 million viewers per week, up 5% versus the year-ago 23.69 million—it’ll be 60 Minutes’ turn to take advantage of the NFL lead-in. Not that CBS’ venerable newsmagazine needs much of a lift; now in its 57th season on the Eye Network, 60 Minutes trails only the NFL’s Sunday and Monday primetime packages as the most-watched, highest-rated nighttime program on the dial.

(For what it’s worth, the NFC North’s who’da-thunk-it season—but for the Bears, every team in the division already has five wins … and Chicago is 4-2—is an extraordinary stroke of luck for the NFL and its media partners, especially given the iffy state of the big-market NFC East. As Chicago goes, so go the Nielsen dials; the nation’s third-largest market is home to 3.66 million TV households, or just shy of 3% of the total U.S. base.)

For its part, Universal Basic Guys will get busted back down to underachiever status until Nov. 3, when it’ll lead out of Lions-Packers. The disparity between episodes that air out of America’s Game of the Week and those that follow repeats or other regional programming is hard to miss; in three non-NFL dates, the show is averaging a TV-low 676,333 viewers, whereas the trio of episodes that benefited from a football boost averaged 3.08 million.

The Sunday NFL lift is of crucial importance for Fox’s non-sports lineup, as the network continues to struggle in nights when it’s running low on sports content. Through Oct. 21, Fox holds the dubious distinction of broadcasting each of the six lowest-rated entertainment programs on the Big Four, a dog’s breakfast of cooking-competition series and inexpensive dramas that are collectively averaging south of 237,000 adults 18-49. Ten years ago, Empire hauled in 6.48 million members of the dollar demo every week.

Of course, the headlong erosion of the linear TV habit was one of the reasons why Fox got out of the pricey scripted game when it did. But as the Sunday primetime numbers demonstrate, there are still plenty of opportunities to grow the non-sports audience, so long as the big guys in the pads are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And while NBC’s audience heads to bed after Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth sign off for the night, the early birds still have another three hours to play with. Beyond the nosebleed ratings and sky-high ad rates (a 30-second unit in a 4:20 game can go for as much as $850,000 a pop), CBS and Fox both get a hell of a lot of milage out of their national NFL slots.

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