NFL Eagles-Bears Draw Huge Ratings

The Eagles not only beat the Chicago Bears Sunday night, they also blew the Golden Globes out of the water.

NBC Sports’ presentation of the Philadelphia Eagles’ down-to-the-wire 16-15 victory over the Chicago Bears in Sunday’s NFC Wild Card game is television’s most-watched show since Super Bowl LII on NBC (Feb. 4, 2018), with a Total Audience Delivery (TAD) of 36.4 million viewers across television and digital, according to fast national live plus same day data from Nielsen, and digital data from Adobe Analytics.

The game averaged 35.89 million TV-only viewers, ranking as NBC’s most-watched NFL Wild Card on record (People Meter history dates to 1988), topping the prior high set by the Seattle Seahawks-Houston Oilers AFC Wild Card game which went to overtime on Jan. 3, 1988 (35.86 million). NBC’s Wild Card viewership was up 15% from the game in the same time slot last year (31.1 million, Panthers-Saints on Fox).

TV-only viewership for Eagles-Bears, which featured five lead changes, peaked at 45.1 million viewers for the exciting conclusion from 7:45-7:54 p.m. ET. Sunday’s game (4:41 p.m.-7:54 p.m. ET) registered a national TV household rating of 19.7/38.

NBC Sports Digital delivered its best-ever NFL Wild Card viewership for Sunday’s game as fans consumed 105.2 million live streaming minutes with an Average Minute Audience (AMA) of 533,000 viewers across NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app, and NFL Digital platforms.

Ratings were up across the NFL for the first round of the playoffs. On Saturday, the Dallas Cowboys' 24-22 win over the Seattle Seahawks drew about 30 million total viewers across FOX, FOX Deportes, and the FOX Sports app, according to the network. The game was up 30 percent over the same playoff window (Falcons-Rams on NBC) last year.

The early game on Saturday — the Indianapolis Colts' 21-7 win over the Houston Texans — averaged about 22.8 million viewers on ABC, ESPN, and ESPN Deportes, a 3-percent bump over the same playoff window (Titans-Chiefs on ESPN) last year.

The Los Angeles Chargers' 23-17 win over the Baltimore Ravens in Sunday’s AFC Wild Card game drew a 17.8 overnight rating on CBS, up two percent from last year’s Bills-Jaguars match-up. Despite the slight bump compared to last year, it was the second-lowest early Sunday window playoff game since 2009, according to Awful Announcing’s Andrew Bucholtz.