Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl rematch draws record-setting 33.8 million viewers – The Athletic – The New York Times

NFL
The Week 2 Super Bowl LIX rematch between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles on Fox during Sunday’s late-afternoon window earned a staggering audience total of 33.8 million viewers, per Nielsen.
The audience total matches the best regular-season Sunday since the league started tracking TV ratings nearly 40 years ago, in 1988. A November 2007 game between the Patriots and Colts on CBS also had 33.8 million viewers. Fox has never had a Sunday regular-season game with this many viewers.
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The only games ahead of those two on the NFL regular-season Top 10 are eight Thanksgiving games and a Monday Night Football game in 1990.
Sunday’s game smashed the NFL’s viewership for a single game in September — a 1993 Monday Night Football game between Dallas and Washington. The highest-ever Week 2 game was last year’s Chiefs-Bengals game, which drew nearly 28 million viewers.
Heading into Sunday, media industry sources told The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch they were projecting around 30 million viewers.
Multiple factors contributed:
• The quality of the matchup: Two wildly popular teams who last met in the Super Bowl, generating a record 127.7 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes, Telemundo, Tubi and the NFL’s digital platforms.
• Lack of competition: No other games were scheduled on Fox, and CBS was offering two games featuring teams outside of the Top 10 media markets (Denver-Indianapolis and Arizona-Carolina).
• Nielsen measurement modifications: Nielsen’s adjustment to its methodology (known as “Big Data + Panel”) more accurately captures viewership on digital platforms, creating an uptick (if not surge) of improved live-sports ratings across a wide swath of televised sports. (Sports Media Watch’s Jon Lewis has a great explainer.)
The record-setting ratings this season may not be finished. Thanksgiving’s Chiefs-Cowboys game in Dallas at 4:30 p.m. ET has the potential to be the most-watched NFL game since the league started tracking, with the mark to beat 42.1 million, set in 2022 on Thanksgiving in a game between the Giants and Cowboys.
A few folks joined the @NFLONFOX for Sunday’s Eagles-Chiefs #SuperBowlLIX rematch. 😉
A massive 33.8 million viewers delivers @FOXSports its best-ever regular season Sunday telecast, most-watched Week 2 @NFL telecast on record and more all-time viewership highs! pic.twitter.com/qVqoCSjc8b
— FOX Sports PR (@FOXSportsPR) September 16, 2025

(Photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
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Dan Shanoff is a Managing Editor for The Athletic, focused on Sports Business. Before joining The Athletic, he held editorial and content-development roles at a range of companies including ESPN, USA Today Sports, Monumental and Quickish, a sports-news start-up he founded. He is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has an MBA from Harvard Business School and was an award-winning adjunct instructor in Georgetown’s Sports Industry Management program. Follow Dan on Twitter @danshanoff

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