The Kansas City Chiefs were the talk of the town this weekend, for more reasons than one.
The 4:25 ET game window on Fox was the most-watched of the week, with the majority of markets getting a front row seat to the team’s stunning 41-10 defeat of the Chicago Bears. Well, and Taylor Swift’s appearance at Arrowhead Stadium following rumors swirling about her connection to Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
Meanwhile, just over 30% of markets watched the Cowboys lose to the Cardinals. In all, Fox drew 24.32M viewers for the Sunday late afternoon matchups, which is down about a million from the most-watched game last week as well as from the same Week 3 time slot last year, when 24.4M people tuned in to watch Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady go head-to-head in the Packers-Buccaneers game.
Earlier in the day, Fox managed 12.21M viewers for the early Sunday game, which was the Packers-Saints in most markets.
NBC’s Sunday Night Football broadcast of the Las Vegas Raiders vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers came in second place for Week 3 viewership with 19.21M people tuning in. That’s a nice lift from last week, when the SNF audience had declined pretty steeply from Week 1.
While CBS can’t claim the biggest audience this week, the broadcaster still took home a pretty significant win with the Patriots-Jets matchup becoming the most-watched September single-header broadcast for the network in 12 years.
The game drew an audience of 17.5M, which is up 19% over last season’s Week 3 telecast. It also helped boost CBS to an average of 18.7M viewers across the first three regular season games, which is the network’s best September NFL audience in more than a decade.
Monday night also proved fruitful for the Disney-owned networks. ABC (combined with ESPN+ and NFL+) drew 13.7M viewers for the Eagles-Buccaneers game and ESPN (along with ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes) notched 9M for the Rams-Bengals matchup.
After the Eagles vs. Buccaneers kicked things off, the two games ended up overlapping for about two hours. During that time frame, both games averaged a combined 22M viewers.
Prime Video ushered in Week 3 with a pretty nice audience of nearly 14M for the Giants-49ers. That’s a 26% increase over last year’s comparable Thursday Night Football matchup, as TNF is up overall this season compared to last.
