“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.”
So goes the apocryphal line popularized by Hans Gruber in the holiday classic “Die Hard.” Perhaps his borderline-namesake, NFL executive Hans Schroeder, knew the same feeling after seeing the viewership for his league’s Thanksgiving Day games — in particular the Chiefs-Cowboys matchup that delivered more than 57 million on CBS. Those numbers helped the NFL to its most-watched week on record, and lifted the season average to a 36-year high that has been sustained in the weeks since.
But that record seems like the sort that will stand for a while.
A few weeks Thanksgiving, Patrick Mahomes limped off Arrowhead Field with a torn ACL as the Chiefs were officially eliminated from the playoffs. If it was not the end of an era, it certainly was the end of a chapter of NFL history. The next iteration of the dynastic Chiefs, if there is one, will necessarily be different.
Maybe there will be a new glamour team to replace Kansas City. But the dynasty Chiefs will be a tough act to follow, with their five Super Bowl appearances in six years, their flair for the dramatic, and their off-court linkages to popular culture. Pitting that kind of dynasty against the league’s most prominent team is the kind of Hailey’s Comet scenario that only comes around every so often.
The flip side of Thanksgiving is what the NFL will experience on Christmas Day. Instead of the best-case scenario of its two most-popular teams fighting for a playoff berth, the NFL is saddled with a tripleheader of teams mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, some featuring third-string quarterbacks. One of those teams is the Chiefs, who not only will be without Mahomes but even second-string QB Gardner Minshew.
All three Christmas Day NFL games feature a team mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. The day opens with a pairing of eliminated teams as the Cowboys face Commanders, followed by the barely-alive Lions against the eliminated Vikings, and finally the eliminated Chiefs against the Broncos. Denver is the only actual contender among the six participating teams.
When the schedule was announced in May, those three games looked as if they would be among the best of the season. The Commanders, coming off of an NFC Championship appearance and gearing up for another run. The Lions and Vikings, who dominated the NFC last season, battling for a division title and perhaps a #1 seed. And the Chiefs and Broncos in a matchup that could determine the AFC West race and whether the playoffs would again run through Kansas City.
It is rare to schedule games that look so good in May and end up so dreadful by December.
But the dreadful Christmas slate has something in common with the league’s best-case Thanksgiving lineup — and that is a gift from Nielsen.
Out-of-Home Viewing: The Greatest Gift of All
As recently as six years ago, all official Nielsen viewership figures consisted of panel-only, in-home data. It was an open secret that those estimates drastically shortchanged live sporting events, which have always been watched in large numbers outside of the home.
In 2020, Nielsen began adding out-of-home viewing to its estimates. Between COVID mitigations and a year-long Nielsen undercount, the significance of that change was not immediately apparent. But as Nielsen has steadily increased the footprint of its out-of-home sample, which as of February now accounts for 100 percent of markets in the lower 48 states, the impact of that addition has become impossible to deny, even as television usage continues to decline.
Add to that Nielsen’s September shift to its new “Big Data + Panel” methodology combining viewership from smart TVs, set-top boxes and select providers’ first-party streaming data (most notably Amazon) with the traditional Nielsen panel. While “Big Data” does not guarantee an increase in viewership — in fact, “Big Data + Panel” can sometimes clock in below its panel-only equivalent — as a general rule it has benefited sports broadcasts in the short time since its rollout.
The result is that even this year’s Christmas slate figures to post an increase over last year. For all the hype surrounding the Netflix Christmas games last year, they did not set an unreachable bar. An average of 24 million is not going to be overly difficult to surpass given the expanded out-of-home viewing and new methodology.
Will viewership surpass the record set two years ago, when the league’s Christmas tripleheader averaged 28.7 million viewers? All three games that year aired on broadcast television, an advantage that could be difficult to overcome even in the current era of measurement. (And that is not even accounting for the difference in game quality.) But even if Christmas does not set a record, the NFL should have a good story to tell when the numbers come out next week.
The reality is that when it comes to high co-viewing holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, it is unlikely that Nielsen will ever ‘max out’ its ability to measure the audience. Even the current methodological changes likely leave a number of viewers unaccounted for. There is still more that can be added to the mix, most notably on the co-viewing side.
That does not mean record-highs are a lock every year, far from it. It is unlikely that there are any remaining methodological changes of the magnitude that allowed the NFL to go from 32 million on Thanksgiving 2019 to 57 million on Thanksgiving 2025. But in a year like this one, every little advantage helps.
It goes without saying that even a weak NFL Christmas Day slate will dominate the NBA’s quintupleheader (though you can be sure there will be plenty of viral tweets treating the comparison as a novelty when the numbers come out next week). But just as the NFL figures to benefit from the Nielsen changes, so too does the NBA.
Last year’s NBA Christmas Day slate averaged 5.3 million viewers, the highest since 2019. The league was helped by the NFL scheduling only two competing games, leaving the primetime window unopposed. It was also helped by some high-quality games, including a thriller between LeBron James’ Lakers and Stephen Curry’s Warriors in that primetime window, which drew nearly eight million viewers.
None of this year’s games will reach that level, but even with the NFL returning to a three-game schedule, Nielsen’s methodological changes and the NFL’s lackluster schedule have the NBA well-positioned to post an increase across the full five-game slate. That increase may well be nominal, but that has not stopped any networks or properties this year from touting ‘viewership growth’ that is in actuality simply a change in how the numbers are counted.
Game quality will of course matter most, but the league put together a strong slate on paper. Spurs-Thunder is a burgeoning rivalry that has gone to a new level since their meeting in the NBA Cup semifinal. The woebegone Mavericks have improved, and Cooper Flagg is starting to attract some notice (though he has yet to move the needle). Rockets-Lakers pairs James and Kevin Durant in one of their final meetings. And Timberwolves-Nuggets has been a high-quality matchup dating back to their seven-game playoff series two years ago.
It also helps that all five games are again being simulcast on broadcast network ABC, while all three NFL games are exclusive to streaming.
Predictions:
— NFL: Cowboys-Commanders (1p Thu Netflix). Last year (KC-PIT): 24.16M. This year: 26.18M.
— NFL: Lions-Vikings (4:30p Thu Netflix). Last year (BAL-HOU): 24.45M. This year: 25.09M.
— NFL: Broncos-Chiefs (8:20p Thu Amazon Prime). Last year: no game. This year: 23.02M.
— NBA: Cavaliers-Knicks (12p Thu ABC/ESPN). Last year (SA/NY): 5.02M. This year: 4.98M.
— NBA: Spurs-Thunder (2:30p Thu ABC/ESPN). Last year (DAL/MIN): 4.49M. This year: 5.32M.
— NBA: Mavericks-Warriors (5p Thu ABC/ESPN). Last year (PHI/BOS): 5.27M. This year: 6.07M.
— NBA: Rockets-Lakers (8p Thu ABC/ESPN). Last year (LAL-GS): 7.94M. This year: 6.18M.
— NBA: Timberwolves-Nuggets (10:30p ABC/ESPN). Last year (PHX-DEN): 3.91M. This year: 4.90M.