Most Wednesdays, ESPN P.R. posts a tweet boasting about the audience generated by the NFL game televised two nights earlier. This year, the habit sparked pushback during the YouTube TV outage that knocked a pair of Monday night games off of the platform.
For the first game after the Disney-owned networks returned to YouTube TV (Cowboys at Raiders), there it was: 17.9 million.
For the next game, the Week 12 contest between the Panthers and 49ers, there was nothing on the ESPN P.R. Twitter page.
On Friday morning, Nielsen distributed the official numbers for the week of November 24 through November 30. The Panthers-49ers game televised by ESPN, ESPN, and ESPN Deportes, attracted an audience of only 12.368 million.
It speaks, frankly, to the general ambivalence regarding the upstart Panthers. After multiple years of irrelevance, no amount of hype (including a 30-second commercial during the Cowboys-Raiders game set to Bohemian Rhapsody) could truly move the needle for what should have been, on paper, a compelling game.
Throw in the fact that the game itself wasn’t particularly exciting, and the numbers speak for themselves.
In the interests of full disclosure, the Sunday night game on NBC and Peacock included in the latest Nielsen report (Broncos-Commanders) did 17.479 million, behind Saturday’s Ohio State-Michigan game (18.424 million).
Since we’re in the NBC ballpark, we’ll also mention this: The National Dog Show on Thanksgiving Day outperformed Panthers-49ers, averaging 12.798 million viewers.
Which proves yet again that, yes, dogs are better than cats.