While the long shadow of another quadrennial upheaval threatened to diminish the NFL’s stranglehold on American media consumption, the 2024 election cycle had relatively little impact on the league’s TV ratings.
Unlike 2016, when NFL deliveries fell 8% in the face of the Trump-Clinton race, this season’s numbers are flat versus the heady year-ago turnout of 17.8 million viewers per game. As much as some of the NFL’s consistency can be chalked up to a marked increase in streaming consumption, football this year managed to hold its own against: a) a televised assassination attempt, b) the sudden removal of the sitting president from the ballots, and c) the general malaise that comes with an 8% drop in overall U.S. TV usage.
If politics failed to shake up the Way Things Are, the intrigue over the presidential race did go a long way toward overwriting the composition of this year’s Top 100 “Broadcasts” list. (The scare quotes are there because I’ll be damned if I know how we’re supposed to refer to the Amazon Prime and Netflix entries, which are a complete pain in the ass, as far as taxonomy is concerned.)
Whereas last year’s chart was a monument to the NFL’s unrelenting need to gobble up everything in its path—Roger Goodell and the boys accounted for 93 of the 100 slots—the 2024 fixtures were somewhat diminished by all the Beltway intrigue. This time around, the NFL has bragging rights to 72 of the 100 most-watched events, well ahead of the 66 slots the league claimed eight years ago, when it also had to contend with the Summer Olympics.
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In fact, the latest tally is strikingly similar to the results from four years ago, when the NFL snapped up 71 of the biggest draws during the election/plague year. The league was joined in 2024 by even more competing sports properties; including four college football games, two nights of Paris Olympics action, the women’s NCAA hoops final and Game 5 of the World Series, sports snatched 80 of the 100 available entries. In 2020, sporting events popped up on the list 74 times, down from 88 the previous year (when the NFL grabbed 73 slots) and 89 in 2018. That latter year saw the NFL lay claim to a relatively modest 61 broadcasts.
As for the NFL games that made the cut in 2024, the list provides further evidence that the power struggle between the AFC and NFC is as well-balanced as it’s been in years. After running roughshod over the junior division for the better part of the last two decades, the NFC has begun ceding ground, accounting for 28 of the year’s most-watched broadcasts compared to the AFC’s 23. (Not all that long ago, the NFC enjoyed a 15-slot advantage.) As cross-flexing becomes more commonplace, interconference meetings have flourished; year-to-date, AFC vs. NFC broadcasts have filled 21 of the 100 top slots. Naturally, the biggest draw among these was Super Bowl LVIII.
Speaking of which, the Kansas City Chiefs share top billing with the Dallas Cowboys with 13 appearances each, while Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens have put their stamp on 10 TV windows, edging the Buffalo Bills by one entry. The evolving rivalries between Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and the aforementioned Jackson have helped power some of the biggest draws on the chart, as the Chiefs-Ravens AFC Championship Game scared up 55.5 million viewers, while the AFC Divisional Playoff between KC and Buffalo delivered 50.4 million viewers.
None of which is to take anything away from the NFC, which still enjoys a big ratings boost whenever Green Bay and San Francisco (10 appearances each) take the national stage, while the Eagles are no slouch with seven top TV stopovers. The NFC’s ratings prowess is in part a function of its geographic distribution; including the split New York and Los Angeles DMAs, the conference has teams situated in each of the top-five DMAs and eight of the top 10.
If it’s widely accepted that TV is now merely a delivery system for the NFL and commercials that try to get you to change your insurance provider, last year’s numbers suggest that at least some of the other members of the so-called Big Four can still draw a crowd under the right set of circumstances. Fox’s coverage of the too-short 2024 World Series featured the Yankees and Dodgers, a combination of market might and star power that helped MLB secure its first top 100 slot since 2019. (Game 4 was just shut out of a berth, finishing two spots south of the also-denied Kentucky Derby at No. 104.)
On the other hand, the absence of LeBron James and Steph Curry during the NBA Finals cramped ABC’s style, as the league’s biggest draw (Game 2 of the Mavs-Celtics series) landed at No. 153. The last time the NBA cracked the list was in 2019, when the final two games of the Raptors-Warriors title tilt set down among the high-50s.
Other highlights include South Carolina’s 87-75 victory over Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the women’s national championship game, a big draw that also happened to be the only college basketball entry for 2024. The closest the men’s tourney got to crashing the list was care of NC State’s ouster of perennial ratings draw Duke in the Elite Eight; per Nielsen, CBS’ coverage of the Blue Devils’ defeat was the year’s 120th most-watched sporting event.
Outside of the usual non-sports outliers—the 98th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the only non-football/non-politics contender to command a seat among the top 50—the 2024 list was marked by the conspicuous absence of regularly scheduled entertainment programming. The series premiere of CBS’ Tracker made some noise in the Super Bowl lead-out slot, and while its regular Sunday night broadcasts won’t ever achieve parity with the afternoon NFL showcase, the drama has held onto a big chunk of its initial sampling.
Through the first eight episodes of Season 2, Tracker is TV’s most-watched and highest-rated scripted show, averaging 8.2 million live-plus-same-day viewers per week, of whom 716,041 are members of the 18-49 demo. By way of comparison, the average episode of primetime entertainment programming on ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox serves up just 3.6 million viewers, a tally that includes 473,064 adults under 50.
Barring any unforeseen spasms of craziness, the NFL’s dominance over the field should reassert itself in next year’s chart. As America steers the rickety tricycle of its fading dominion toward the boundless horizon of partisan derangement and endless griping, football will once again go about its job of trying to distract us from whatever the government decides to get up to in 2025. While there’s no guarantee we’ll see a repeat performance of the NFL’s monocle-popping 2023 run, the dispersal of cyclical election intrigue should go a long way toward making this coming year’s list look a lot more like the chart we published 12 months ago.
If you’re a fan of the never-ending political process (sicko), the next general Election Day is 1,404 days from now—and you can cast your midterm votes in just 669 days. In the meantime, there’s an awful lot of football to watch.
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