7 million people tune in for Hall of Fame Game on NBC, Peacock

As usual, an obscene number of Americans tuned in for arguably the most meaningless NFL game of the year.

NBC Sports announced that Thursday’s Hall of Fame Game between the Carolina Panthers and Arizona Cardinals averaged 7.0 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, a marginal 1% increase over last year’s game between the Los Angeles Chargers and Detroit Lions (6.9 million viewers). By edging out last year’s audience, this year’s Hall of Fame Game telecast is now the most-watched since the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers descended on Canton, Ohio in 2021, when Fox scored 7.3 million viewers for the preseason opener.

The Panthers’ last-second win was the most-watched Hall of Fame Game on NBC since 2017 (8.2 million viewers for Cowboys-Cardinals). NBC has aired seven of the last nine Hall of Fame Games.

Back to Football…Big Numbers for Down-to-the-Wire Pro Football Hall of Fame Game on NBC and Peacock! pic.twitter.com/4nK30qaYaC

— NBC Sports PR (@NBCSportsPR) August 10, 2026

Suffice it to say, the NFL’s Hall of Fame Game audience would be the envy of any other league’s regular-season affairs. (Heck, the NHL would take 7.0 million viewers for a Stanley Cup Final game in a heartbeat.) The NFL has averaged 6.36 million viewers for the Hall of Fame Game since 2021. For comparison, the most-watched NBA regular-season game last season was 7.76 million viewers for Lakers-Warriors on Christmas Day. MLB’s largest regular-season audience in 2025 was a Red Sox-Yankees game on Fox that averaged 3.05 million viewers.

There’s perhaps nothing more emblematic of the NFL’s viewership dominance than the fact that the most meaningless game it’ll put on national television all year still blows away the audiences that other major professional sports leagues attract.

Even crazier, this year’s Hall of Fame Game featured arguably two of the least-popular teams in the entire NFL. Of course, the game coming down to the last play (a game-winning touchdown by Panthers quarterback Haynes King) certainly helped the cause. But still, 7.0 million people? When fewer and fewer people even watch linear television in the first place? There really is no comparison to the power of NFL programming.