What could end up being one of the best NFL games of this season took place thousands of miles away in the Southern Hemisphere.
That didn’t matter for the CBS audience, who still tuned in in large numbers.
Sunday afternoon’s game between the Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys, a back-and-forth thriller that ended on a spectacular seven-second drive orchestrated by Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson and kicker Tyler Loop, averaged 24.9 million viewers on CBS, making it the most-watched NFL International Series game in history. The Ravens’ “trio in Rio” was the most-watched Week 3 contest on CBS since 2014 and beat last year’s comparable Week 3 game (Cowboys-Bears on Fox) by five percent. Viewership for Sunday’s game peaked at more than 30 million viewers, per CBS.
As one might expect, placing Sunday’s game from Rio de Janeiro in a traditional late-afternoon window on broadcast television performed better than other recent international games in nontraditional windows. Earlier this year, the 49ers-Rams game from Australia, which aired on a Thursday night on Netflix, averaged 18.5 million viewers. In 2025, the previous NFL game played in Brazil (Chiefs-Chargers) drew 18.5 million viewers on a Friday night on YouTube.
However, despite the quality of Sunday’s game and its Brazilian flair, Ravens-Cowboys drew over two million fewer viewers than Fox’s Week 2 game between the Cowboys and Washington Commanders (27.2 million viewers). It also fell short of CBS’ 2025 season-long average for the 4:25 p.m. ET national window, which earned the network 25.83 million viewers last year.
By those standards, one could argue that 24.9 million viewers for Sunday’s game came in slightly below expectations, particularly given that the Cowboys are the league’s strongest ratings draw.
However, having the crown as the NFL’s most-watched international game in history counts for something, with the obvious caveats that many of those games have been played in unfavorable time zones for the American audience and often aren’t shown on network television.
Why Sunday’s audience wasn’t as large as one might anticipate isn’t immediately clear. The game itself was very swingy, with the Cowboys jumping out to a double-digit lead early before the Ravens took a double-digit lead themselves late in the third quarter. Perhaps some viewers tuned out thinking the game was over. It also faced competition on ABC, airing a Fever-Aces WNBA playoff game, and NBC, airing the final day of the Presidents Cup. Though, maybe it’s as simple as American viewers preferring to watch games in front of a home crowd rather than in another country. Or maybe it’s another sign that NFL viewership overall could be headed for a slight decline this year, potentially due to another round of Nielsen changes.
Regardless, as the NFL looks towards international expansion, these are the data points it’ll be looking at. Who knows if the same game would’ve earned more viewers if it had been played in Dallas instead of Rio, but the data certainly suggests a bonkers game between the Ravens and Cowboys should’ve had a few million more viewers.
That said, 24.9 million viewers is nothing to scoff at. And it should remain the most-watched international game in NFL history for a while, at least until the league schedules another late-Sunday-afternoon game outside the United States.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.