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The Sunday Night Football regular season finale between the Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions was as hotly anticipated and as meaningful as almost any NFL regular season game in history. Two teams playing not just for a divisional title but also for home-field advantage throughout the playoffs doesn’t happen every day.
While the game ended up being a bit of a clunker down the stretch after the Lions dominated the second-half, that did not dissuade people from watching the game. Instead, it brought in huge ratings that shows just how big of a powerhouse the NFL is.
Sunday night’s matchup of NFC North foes was the first-ever NFL regular season game between teams that both had 14 wins. With that much on the line, everyone knew that the ratings would be huge. After all, Sunday Night Football is the most-watched program on television to begin with. And, this was a huge matchup.
After a close first half that saw Detroit take a 10-6 lead, a beat-up Lions defense used clutch stop after clutch stop to pull away and win, 31-9.
How many people watched? A lot. To be more exact, nearly 30 million. Here’s ProFootballTalk with more.
The Vikings-Lions all-the-marbles contest attracted, on average, 28.5 million viewers on NBC and Peacock.
The number trails only the 2012 regular-season finale between Washington and Dallas (30.5 million) and the 2024 season opener between the Ravens and Chiefs (29.2 million).
The audience topped the 2023 regular-season finale between the Bills and Dolphins by 24 percent, and it’s expected to be the most-watched primetime show since the Ravens-Chiefs game that started the season.
With the playoffs upcoming, the NFL got an early head start this year on games that are ratings bonanzas.
To compare to the NBA and MLB, according to quick research, the last NBA game to get that kind of viewership was Michael Jordan’s last game as a Chicago Bull, Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals. The last baseball game to be watched by that many people was Game 7 of the 2017 World Series between the Dodgers and the Astros. Mind you, those are both championship games, and this is an NFL regulars season game.