FOX Sports is celebrating the massive viewership for their broadcast of the NFL Week 2 matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs this past Sunday.
This game was a highly anticipated rematch of Super Bowl LIX (played in February 2025), where the Eagles had previously defeated the Chiefs. The telecast shattered multiple viewership records, underscoring the NFL's enduring popularity amid declining audiences for other sports and TV programming.
It drew an average of 33.8 million viewers across FOX, FOX Deportes, and other platforms, marking a 21% increase from the previous year's Week 2 late window (which featured the Chiefs vs. Bengals and averaged 27.9 million viewers).
This game wasn't just a hit for FOX—it set benchmarks across NFL history.
Here's a breakdown of the records broken, based on Nielsen measurements:
- FOX's Best-Ever Regular Season Sunday Telecast: At 33.8 million viewers, it surpassed all prior FOX Sunday regular-season games. The network's previous high was lower, and this figure excludes Thanksgiving, Monday Night Football, or playoff games, which often draw larger crowds.
- Most-Watched Week 2 NFL Telecast on Record: This topped the prior Week 2 record set by the 2024 Chiefs-Bengals game (27.9 million viewers). It's the highest for any Week 2 game since detailed tracking began in the late 1980s.
- Most-Viewed September/October NFL Game Ever: No other regular-season game in these early-season months has matched this audience. The previous September/October high was a 1993 Monday Night Football game between the Cowboys and Commanders (29.02 million viewers).
- Largest NFL Doubleheader Audience in Network TV History: The full FOX doubleheader (including the earlier Giants-Cowboys game, which averaged 20.72 million viewers and went to overtime) averaged 26.9 million viewers overall— the best for any Sunday doubleheader.
- FOX's Strongest Start to an NFL Season: Through the first two weeks, FOX is averaging 23.8 million viewers per game, up 27% from 2024's 18.7 million average and the network's best two-week start since acquiring NFL rights.
The pregame show FOX NFL Sunday drew 5.5 million viewers, its highest since 2019.For context, this 33.8 million figure represents the largest Nielsen-measured TV audience for any network broadcast since the Super Bowl LIX itself (which had 127.7 million viewers across all platforms). Note that comparisons to pre-2025 numbers involve some caveats due to Nielsen's updated methodology, including expanded out-of-home viewing and "Big Data + Panel" metrics.