Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs helped break an NFL record for total viewership in the AFC Championship game.
Love them or hate them, football fans can’t help but tune in and watch the Kansas City Chiefs — who just broke an NFL record spanning back to “at least” 1988.
On January 28, sports correspondent John Ourand reported that “the [Buffalo] Bills-Chiefs Championship game averaged 57.7 million viewers, making it the most-watched AFC Championship game dating back to at least 1988.”
Ourand also added that Chiefs-Bills is now “the NFL’s second most-watched non Super Bowl game behind the 2009-10 [Minnesota] Vikings–[New Orleans] Saints on Fox.” And that these AFC Championship viewership numbers are “up 4% from last year’s [Baltimore] Ravens-Chiefs game that was in the early window.”
Ourand attributed all of these statistics to Nielsen.
To put these viewership numbers in perspective. Last year, in February of 2024, Nielsen reported that the Super Bowl between the Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers produced an “estimated 123.7 million viewers… according to average audience estimates.”
That means Sunday’s AFC Championship game drew nearly half the number of viewers as last year’s big game, which is extremely impressive historically speaking.
It also crushed the most-watched NFL game of November through December (2024) by almost 20 million viewers.
“While FOX delivered the most-watched program across the month—the Thanksgiving Day NFL game between the [Dallas] Cowboys and the [New York] Giants, which drew 38.5 million viewers and 8.2 billion viewing minutes—it was hard to match the company-best record it set in November thanks to boosts from the World Series and presidential election coverage,” Nielsen reported on January 28. “The result of the absence was a 14% drop in viewership to finish December with 7.1% of TV.”
Clearly, based on playoff viewership, the NFL continues to reign supreme across America, and it’s also gaining more and more traction around the globe. Superstar quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen are surely a big part of that, as is the influence of celebrities like Taylor Swift who were in attendance to watch the Chiefs and Bills.
