If there was any question whether the Kansas City Chiefs would return to form, both on the field and in the ratings, they have been answered early in this NFL season.
Sunday’s Week 4 NFL national window, featuring Chiefs-Raiders in 69% of markets, averaged 28.45 million viewers on CBS — marking the largest NFL audience of the ongoing season, and the top Week 4 audience on any network in the Nielsen people meter era (1988-present).
(Note that out-of-home viewing was not included in Nielsen estimates until 2020 or fully accounted for until 2025, that this is only in the second year of a new Nielsen methodology integrating “Big Data” from smart TVs, set-top boxes and first party data with its traditional panel, and that Nielsen has recently tweaked its measurement to better account for co-viewing of games.)
Viewership increased 20% from coverage featuring Ravens-Chiefs in Week 4 last year (23.77M). Before awarding the Chiefs all the credit for the strong audience, keep in mind that the Raiders’ undefeated record was probably a contributing factor — and a full 21% of the country got another marquee game between the Broncos and 49ers.
Even so, the Chiefs would seem to be the obvious driving factor. Kansas City has now been featured in three of the seven most-watched NFL windows this season, tied with the Cowboys as the most of any team. (It is also true that the Chiefs and Cowboys have been headlined in the league’s marquee late afternoon and primetime windows more than any other team.)
Kansas City has a bye this week and then faces the winless Chargers in Week 6, meaning it will likely be until Week 7 — a titanic “Sunday Night Football” matchup against the defending champion Seahawks — before they add another game to the list.
In other action, CBS averaged 15.23 million for its early doubleheader window, featuring Patriots-Bills in 65% of markets — up 13% from a year ago (13.50M). The full doubleheader averaged 21.99 million, up 18% from last year and the network’s most-watched NFL doubleheader in the month of October.
FOX averaged 19.15 million for singleheader coverage featuring Rams-Eagles — up 7% from last year (17.8M).
Figures for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” game are being reprocessed by Nielsen and were not available as of Tuesday evening. Nor were complete figures available for the Colts-Commanders International Series game from London on NFL Network.