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Overtime Games Deliver Best NFL Championship Sunday Since '16

Patriots-Chiefs averaged 53.9 million viewers, marking the second-best AFC title game on recordGETTY IMAGES

The NFL this year had its best championship Sunday viewership since ’16, fueled by the second-best AFC title game in 42 years. The average for Rams-Saints (Fox) and Patriots-Chiefs (CBS) was just under 49 million viewers, which is the league’s best figure since ’16, when Broncos-Patriots and Panthers-Cardinals averaged 49.7 million viewers. Patriots-Chiefs, which went to overtime on Sunday night, averaged 53.9 million viewers, which is the second-best AFC title game on record (going back to ’78). Only CBS’ Steelers-Jets game from ’11 was higher (54.9 million). Patriots-Chiefs also is the best conference title game of any kind since Fox drew 55.9 million viewers for Seahawks-49ers in '14. In primetime last year, Fox drew 42.3 million viewers for Eagles-Vikings. Meanwhile, Fox finished with 44.1 million viewers for the Rams’ OT win over the Saints on Sunday in the late afternoon window. That is flat compared to Patriots-Jaguars last year in the same window on CBS. Rams-Saints also had an average minute audience of 818,609 viewers on Fox Sports Go, marking the platform’s most-streamed NFL playoff game on record, and well ahead of the 468,000 viewers for Eagles-Vikings last season (Austin Karp, THE DAILY).

EMERGING MARKETS: CNN's Brian Lowry wrote it is "easy to forget the power that NFL franchises have" in individual TV markets, and "how valuable they are to the local stations of the network that carries them." Lowry: "Look no further than the massive numbers for the Patriots-Chiefs game in Kansas City (a 60.1 rating) and Boston (58.5)" (RELIABLE SOURCES, 1/21). In K.C., Blair Kerkhoff noted the city was reinforced as "one of the NFL's top local markets." The 60.1 rating for Patriots-Chiefs was "about the same as the Royals' World Series-clinching Game 5 triumph" over the Mets in '15, which drew a 60.0 (KANSASCITY.com, 1/21).

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