San Francisco 49ers Defeat Dallas Cowboys In NBC’s Most-Watched ‘Sunday Night Football’ Matchup Ever — NFL Week 5 Ratings

Katie Campione
·2 min read
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UPDATED: The San Francisco 49ers defeat of the Dallas Cowboys is without a doubt the talk of the town for Week 5 of the NFL regular season.

Sunday night’s matchup on NBC drew 24.3M viewers on linear TV — which rose to 26.3M when streaming viewership was factored in. That was by far the most-watched game of the week and, in fact, is the most-watched Week 5 NBC Sunday Night Football game since the program began in 2006.

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This marks the third time NBC has taken the top spot this regular season.

CBS took second place with the NFL national window, broadcasting the Chiefs-Vikings in most markets. About 23M people tuned in to watch another Chiefs victory, boosting CBS to its best five-week start in more than two decades.

Earlier in the day, CBS only managed to draw about 12.6M viewers for the Pittsburgh Steelers win over the Baltimore Ravens (in a majority of markets).

For its Sunday singleheader, Fox averaged 16.8M viewers — up about 14% from last year’s comparable game window. About 32% of markets got the Eagles vs. Rams, while the rest of the markets were split between four other matchups.

Prime Video may not have been able to claim top viewership this week, but Thursday Night Football is still making some considerable gains for the streamer. The Chicago Bears win over the Washington Commanders was watched by about 11.7M people, which marks a 21% increase over last year’s comparable game window as well as a 33% increase over last year’s TNF Commanders-Bears matchup (on October 13).

This marks the fourth week in a row that TNF has posted double-digit viewership growth over the previous year’s comparable games. The four-game average is up 41% versus last year’s full season average.

ABC/ESPN took third place overall with Monday Night Football‘s telecast of the Packers-Raiders game, which brought in 17.38M viewers.

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