Thursday Night Football NFL NBC

As the first season of the CBS/NBC split on the Thursday Night Football package is in the home stretch, it appears the Peacock has the edge on the Tiffany Network in both ratings and viewership. Unlike the last the two seasons where CBS aired eight games mostly in the first half of the season with NFL Network airing the second half, CBS and NBC split the package with both networks airing five games and NFL Network airing six.

NBC has aired three of its five game package and this far, has averaged a 10.5 rating with 17.5 million viewers. The Peacock has been helped by having the Dallas-Minnesota  matchup in Week 13 and the Oakland-Kansas City game in Week 14, both of which averaged over 17 million viewers. It still has Los Angeles-Seattle and New York Giants-Philadelphia on its schedule.

NBC’s TNF numbers put it behind the CBS and Fox late Sunday afternoon windows and its own Sunday Night Football ratings as the fourth-highest rated national package for the

CBS on the other hand averaged a 9.0 rating and 14.7 million viewers for its half of the package and had the misfortune to fall into the ratings slump that befell the league during the Presidential election. Before the season began, CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus told Awful Announcing that the network preferred airing the first half of the season,:

“We wanted the first part of the package. It’s a powerful and tremendous marketing opportunity for our primetime schedule. The games are almost guaranteed to be meaningful games at the beginning of the season.”

CBS CEO Les Moonves added that the network got the better end of the TNF deal saying that NBC had the potential to get stuck with bad games in the second half:

“We like having the early games because at this point, everybody is still in contention,” he said. “After two or three weeks, some of them are not, and you get [stuck with] a team that you know is out of the ballpark.”

As it worked out at least for this season, NBC’s Minnesota-Dallas and Oakland-KC games had teams that were in contention plus the Cowboys have been the trigger for a second-half ratings rebound for the NFL’s TV partners.

McManus and Moonves will likely say that the election definitely affected their numbers in the first half of the season and that this will be an anamoly. They’ll still be bullish on their half of the package for next season.

Unless NBC’s next two games take a precipitous first half-like ratings drop, it appears that its half of TNF will be the winner for this season.

[Advertising Age]

About Ken Fang

Ken has been covering the sports media in earnest at his own site, Fang's Bites since May 2007 and at Awful Announcing since March 2013.

He provides a unique perspective having been an award-winning radio news reporter in Providence and having worked in local television.

Fang celebrates the four Boston Red Sox World Championships in the 21st Century, but continues to be a long-suffering Cleveland Browns fan.