Only a few weeks ago, Amazon’s Prime Video touted its viewership for Thursday Night Football as up by 20 percent compared to last season’s full average and 48 percent compared to 2022. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the previous two weeks provided some of the best TNF games we’ve seen in quite some time.
But Thursday told a different story.
Coming into the day, a matchup with little to no fanfare other than Sean Payton’s return to New Orleans was already competing with two Major League Baseball League Championship Series. There was Game 4 of the NLCS between the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers and Game 3 of the ALCS between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Guardians.
And not for nothing, that latter one was an instant classic.
However, the LCS’s viewership took a noticeable hit. According to Sports Media Watch, the Yankees-Guardians game on TBS and truTV averaged 4.3 million viewers, while the Dodgers-Mets game on FS1 averaged four million. But even with low MLB numbers, TNF was down as well.
Jon Lewis of SMW reported that Broncos-Saints drew an average of 9.81 million viewers on Prime Video. That makes it the season’s least-watched Thursday Night Football game. The first five games surpassed 12 million viewers, marking the longest streak in the since-2022 era of Amazon as the league’s exclusive (beyond broadcast TV in the two home cities) TNF broadcaster.
The drop in viewership likely reflects the declining quality of Thursday’s matchup. Behind Bo Nix’s 16-of-26 for 164 yards performance, the Broncos routed the Saints, 33-10.
The Bo Nix-Spencer Rattler quarterback matchup would’ve been intriguing in the sense that the two started their respective collegiate careers at Auburn and Oklahoma and then later transferred to Oregon and South Carolina. Not for nothing, but the quarterback matchup sounded more interesting than Payton’s homecoming to The Big Easy. But it didn’t really work out that way.
It’s not like the game was marred by penalties or turnovers. It was just an ugly display of football, and Amazon’s ratings suffered as a result.
SMW said the game hit its peak viewership of 11.72 million around 9:15 p.m. ET before the first quarter ended. Despite that, it still managed a slight uptick from last year’s Jaguars-Saints matchup (9.79 million), making it the most-watched Week 7 Thursday Night Football game since the series was last broadcast on network TV in 2021.
It’s hard to imagine that next Thursday’s Minnesota Vikings-Los Angeles Rams will be worse.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.