If you want to be part of television history, we suggest tuning into the Chiefs versus the Cowboys in Dallas on Thursday.
The Thanksgiving Day game will air at 4:25 p.m. ET on CBS and stream live on Paramount+ and Fubo, and unless one of the teams is leading by 35 or 40 points at halftime, the easy prediction is that the game will set a record as the most-viewed NFL regular-season game in history.
“It’s the perfect confluence of three of the biggest brands in American culture — the Cowboys, the Chiefs and Thanksgiving,” CBS lead NFL play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz told The Athletic.
The current record was set three Thanksgivings ago, when the Cowboys and Giants drew 42 million viewers in 2022 in a late-afternoon game. That topped the 41.55 million viewership average for a Dec. 3, 1990, Monday night game between the Giants and Niners on ABC. (For fans of old-school NFL: That Monday night matchup at Candlestick Park was a meeting of 10-1 teams and featured boldfaced names such as Joe Montana, Phil Simms, Jerry Rice and Lawrence Taylor.)
The NFL’s decision this year to pit its two most-watched teams against each other on its most-watched day of regular-season football was not accidental, based on talking to a number of people at different networks. Viewership is the engine that drives the NFL, and setting a new regular-season viewership record is news that will cross over from the “inside baseball” world of sports media and sports business writers into the broader sports-fan ecosystem.
Momentum is always a factor for viewership pops, and there is positive momentum for both teams heading into Thursday’s game. The Cowboys had a massive comeback win over the Eagles on Sunday, complete with a thrilling finish. Dallas is 5-5-1 and at least in the hunt for a playoff spot. (They currently have a 14 percent chance of making the postseason based on The Athletic’s NFL Playoff Simulator, but those odds will jump with a win on Thursday.) The Chiefs’ 23-20 overtime victory over the Colts essentially saved their season. Kansas City has a 57 percent chance of making the playoffs.
In short, Thursday’s game has the feel of an elimination game. It matters.
This year’s viewership number will also get a boost from Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel Technology, which offers better data for out-of-home viewership.
Given this, I think Chiefs-Cowboys has an outside shot at reaching a record-shattering 50 million viewers if it’s close in the final quarter.
“When we worked with the NFL in the offseason to plan the schedule for this year, the Chiefs-Cowboys matchup of course got everyone’s attention,” CBS Sports president David Berson said this week. “It’s a matchup featuring two of the league’s biggest brands and viewership drivers and then for it to be on Thanksgiving in what is typically the most-viewed time slot of the season, we knew it could be something very special.
“The stars have aligned, especially with both teams fighting for their playoff lives and coming off thrilling, come-from-behind victories. We won’t make ratings predictions, but it’s hard to ignore the potential for this game to not only be the most-viewed regular-season game this season but possibly of all-time. Let’s hope for a great game.”
Last year’s set of Thanksgiving Day games (Bears-Lions, Giants-Cowboys and Dolphins-Packers) averaged 34.2 million, the highest Thanksgiving Day average on record (records date back to 1988).
• The late-afternoon game on Fox between the Giants and Cowboys (who had just six combined wins at the time) was the high for the day with 38.8 million viewers, the fourth most-watched Thanksgiving Day game on record and fifth most-watched NFL regular-season game on record.
• The early game on CBS between the Bears and Lions averaged 37.5 million viewers, the most-watched early Thanksgiving Day game on record.
• The primetime game (Dolphins-Packers) on NBC ended up being the low for the day with an average of 26.1 million viewers. That was down 3 percent from 26.9 million for the 49ers-Seahawks primetime Thanksgiving game in 2024.
I made the argument last year that the Chiefs had surpassed the Cowboys as the league’s preeminent viewership draw. Kansas City’s recent run — four Super Bowl appearances in the last five years and a 72-23 regular-season record since the start of the 2020 season — prompted the NFL to place them in high-profile windows. The Chiefs were the primary reason CBS finished its 2024 schedule with its most-watched season since 1998 (an average of 19.3 million viewers), and why CBS edged out Fox (24.64 million to 24.62 million) in the 2023 late-afternoon window battle.
Meanwhile, the Cowboys have been the NFL’s viewership bell cow for decades. There’s a reason every network lobbies the league’s broadcasting department for as many Cowboys games as possible.
The Chiefs and Cowboys have only met on 12 occasions, and the two teams last met on Nov. 21, 2021 — a 17-9 Chiefs win in Kansas City. That game, airing on Fox in the late-afternoon Sunday window, averaged 28.06 million viewers, making it the then-most-watched game of the season to date. It ultimately finished as the most-watched regular-season game of the 2021 season — excluding the Thanksgiving Day games — and was the No. 11 overall NFL broadcast, including the Super Bowl.
CBS’s naturally has its ‘A’ crew calling the game, including Nantz, Tony Romo and Tracy Wolfson. This will be Nantz’s 22nd call of a Thanksgiving game, which is a remarkable number for a broadcaster.
“We couldn’t have asked for a better appetizer than both teams winning thrillers on Sunday,” Nantz said. “We will treat it the same way we have every year on Thanksgiving, with gratitude and respect for the game.”
Nantz wants a late-finishing thriller as every other neutral observer does, and if he and CBS Sports get it, they are going to land in the history books when it comes to sports TV viewership.
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