The NFL ended its 2021 season with the most viewers per game since 2015, fueled by a record number of close contests and an extended, 17-game regular season.
The pro-football league said its 2021 contests averaged 17.1 million viewers across TV and digital platforms, up 10% from the 256-game schedule in 2020 and the most since an 18.1 million average for the league's 2015 campaign. Interest in the 2021 regular season was stoked by a record 34 matchups decided on the final play; and 49 contests featured game-winning scores in the last minute of regulation or overtime.
All NFL TV partners registered audience gains over the 2020 season, when viewership was hampered by the pandemic and interest in the heightened political climate and presidential election cycle.
ESPN
ESPN (US) registered the highest percentage advance of the league's TV partners. Augmented by several ABC (US) simulcasts and star-studded analysis — former NFL quarterbacks and brothers Peyton and Eli Manning analyzed matchups on ESPN2 (US) — the 17-game "Monday Night Football" slate averaged a combined 13.5 million watchers, up 11% from 11.8 million in 2020. The "Manning Casts" contributed 1.6 million viewers on average across nine airings.
Under the new NFL rights deals reached in March, ESPN/ABC added a doubleheader on the final Saturday of the regular season. The prime-time Dallas-Philadelphia matchup on Jan. 8 scored with 20.2 million viewers, while Kansas City-Denver coverage in the late afternoon window attracted 19.1 million to rank as the third and fifth most-watched contests since ESPN kicked off its "Monday Night Football" package coverage in 2006.
The Jan. 8 coverage boosted ESPN's 19-game average to almost 14.2 million watchers, the highest "Monday Night Football" regular-season viewership since 2010.
NBC, CBS and FOX
NBC (US)'s "Sunday Night Football" averaged 18.5 million viewers, up 10.1% from 16.8 million 2020. The delivery should make the package the most-watched show in prime time for an 11th straight season.
Gauged from a Total Audience Delivery standpoint, which includes viewing on the NBC broadcast network, streaming service Peacock, NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app, NFL Digital platforms and Yahoo Sports mobile properties, "Sunday Night Football" averaged 19.3 million viewers for the 2021 season, up 10.9% from 17.4 million last year, according to national live plus same-day data from Nielsen Holdings PLC and digital data from Adobe Analytics.
For its part, CBS (US) averaged just over 18.0 million viewers, a 9% gain from 2020's 16.5 million audience average and its best performance in six years. The network received a boost from its Thanksgiving telecast of the Las Vegas-Dallas matchup, which drew 40.8 million viewers, the largest audience for an NFL regular-season game since a 1990 New York Giants-San Francisco contest. That game's "Monday Night Football" telecast on ABC was viewed by nearly 41.5 million.
"America's Game of the Week" on FOX (US) averaged 23.1 million viewers, dipping from 23.2 million the prior campaign but still enough to extend its stretch as linear TV's most-watched show to 13 seasons.
Overall, the FOX's Sunday afternoon NFL telecasts pulled in 18.6 million viewers, a 2.8% advance from last season's 18.1 million average audience. During the just-completed season, FOX scored its largest digital delivery with an average-minute audience of 520,586 million.
Thursday takeaways
The final year of FOX's coverage of "Thursday Night Football" proved to be its best from an audience perspective. Tri-cast partners, FOX, NFL Network (US) and Amazon.com Inc.'s Prime Video, in concert with FOX Deportes (US) and various digital offerings, on average generated 16.4 million viewers. That was a 16% jump from 14.1 million last year and the best "Thursday Night Football" performance since 2015, when CBS and NFL Network counted a combined 17.7 million watchers for the package on average.
The "Thursday Night Football" average was buoyed by the inclusion of the Green Bay-Cleveland game on Christmas Day that produced the third-biggest audience of the campaign, with FOX, NFL Network and digital outlets together collecting 28.6 million watchers.
The package's audience, though, figures to retreat during the 2022 season, when Prime Video steps in as the primary holder.
Prime Video and Twitch, plus NFL and other mobile properties, exclusively presented the Arizona-San Francisco game on Dec. 26, 2020, that earned an average-minute audience of 4.8 million. Adding viewership from TV stations in the two teams' home markets, the average-minute audience reached 5.9 million, according to the NFL.
Digital and streaming across NFL, Yahoo Sports, FOX Sports, Prime Video and Twitch properties produced an average-minute audience of 1.3 million for "Thursday Night Football" in 2021, 25% more than the combined 1.1 million last season.
