SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL SCORES RECORD OPENER

An average of 23 million viewers tuned in to NBC to watch the first Sunday Night Football game (actually played on Sunday) of the season, which, if the overnight numbers hold up, would make it the most-watched SNF telecast ever — up 3 percent over last year’s record for a season opener. Actually, because overnight […]

AFC FINALE: BEST RATINGS SINCE 1987

Sunday’s AFC championship game on CBS in which the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the New York Jets averaged 48.43 million viewers, peaking in the second half hour with 52.3 million — making it the highest-rated AFC final-game telecast in 24 years. But by the time the fourth quarter came around, the number of viewers had slipped […]

CBS AGAIN DOMINATES WEEKLY RATINGS

Some 50.55 million viewers tuned in to CBS’s telecast of the AFC Divisional Playoff game between the New York Jets and the New England Patriots on Sunday, and while Nielsen did not include the primetime runover from 7:00 p.m. to 7:48 p.m. in its primetime ratings for the week, it did include the 12-minute postgame […]

30.3 MILLION TUNE IN ON A SATURDAY NIGHT

Television executives have all but written off Saturday in their program planning, so small are the audiences for shows on that night. But others have pointed out that Saturday once attracted some of television’s biggest audiences, and indeed NBC’s telecast of Saturday’s New York Jets/Indianapolis Colts contest, won by a Jets’ field goal as time […]

FOOTBALL ON CABLE WINS ON MONDAY

Football fans were clearly not sated by Thursday and Sunday’s NFL games. They returned to their sets on Monday for a double header carried on cable by ESPN as part of its Monday Night Football franchise. The two games recorded a 7 percent increase in ratings over last year, with the first game, the New […]