The NFL’s Thanksgiving afternoon games provided a ratings feast for Fox and CBS

Both networks set ratings records for their games —not just for Thanksgiving, but for any regular-season NFL game they’ve ever aired. The audiences for the Green Bay Packers-Detroit Lions matchup on Fox and the Kansas City Chiefs-Dallas Cowboys game on CBS rivaled those for last season’s conference championships, which typically are the biggest games (and TV broadcasts) of any given year behind the Super Bowl.

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Fox’s early afternoon broadcast of the Packers’ win over the Lions averaged 47.7 million viewers, per Nielsen, making it the network’s biggest regular-season game ever. It’s also the most watched Thanksgiving game on record in the early broadcast window and was up about 27 percent from CBS’ early afternoon game last year.

In the late afternoon window, CBS drew a massive 57.23 million viewers for the Cowboys’ victory —the largest audience ever, on any network, for an NFL regular season game. It outpaced Fox’s 2024 telecast in the same window by 47.5 percent and came within a couple hundred thousand viewers of matching the audience for CBS’ primetime broadcast of the AFC Championship in January. Fox’s Thanksgiving game outdrew the NFC Championship by about 3.5 million viewers.

Ratings for NBC’s primetime game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Baltimore Ravens weren’t available at publication time.

There are some caveats here for historical comparisons: This season is the first for Nielsen’s big data plus panel measurement, which has provided a boost for the NFL and other live sports over previous years’ panel-only figures. Nielsen is also measuring out of home viewing in the entire country for the first time this season, whereas the past few years included about 65 percent of its national sample.

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Even accounting for those changes, however, the audience for the Thanksgiving afternoon games is pretty well unprecedented.