Eagles-Cowboys second-most-watched NFL Kickoff game despite weather delay

NBC’s 20th season of Sunday Night Football kicked off with a bang, both on the field and in the ratings.

Last Thursday’s NFC East spittin’ showdown between the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys was an exciting back-and-forth affair that averaged 28.3 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, based on official Nielsen Big Data + Panel and digital data from Adobe Analytics, making it the second-most-watched NFL Kickoff game ever.

It almost certainly would have ended up as the most-watched to date, but a 65-minute rain delay dampened the eventual audience when the game resumed. Before that, the audience peaked at an average of 34.3 million viewers from 9:30 to 9:45 p.m. ET (late second quarter), the most significant number for any stretch of an NFL Kickoff game.

Last year’s Kickoff game between the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs remains in the top spot with an average of 29.2 million viewers.

Sticking just with Peacock, the Average Minute Audience (AMA) for the Cowboys-Eagles live stream was 4.9 million viewers, which was NBC’s second most “simulstreamed” (their word) NFL game ever, beating out three Super Bowls and trailing only Super Bowl LVI in 2022.

With so many ratings numbers this season, it’s essential to remember that NFL ratings numbers will come with a caveat this year. As Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner pointed out in his article about record-smashing Week 1 college football numbers, this is the first football season to utilize Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel, which will enhance viewership measurements for live sports compared to the old methods, making comparisons to past years somewhat muddied. The NFL has come right out and said it feels as though Nielsen was undercounting its audiences in years past (if you can believe it), so it’ll be thrilled to see these numbers, especially coming off a 2024 in which its overall numbers took a dip.