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CBS Hits Super Bowl Record 123.4 Million Viewers on OT Heroics
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- CBS Hits Super Bowl Record 123.4 Million Viewers on OT Heroics
It was only the second Super Bowl to be decided in overtime in the last 58 years, and the first to feature the biggest recording artist on the planet getting in on the postgame celebration. As such, there's little wonder that CBS' broadcast of Sunday night's 49ers-Chiefs thriller set a new ratings record. Well, sort of.
According to Nielsen, Kansas City 's 25-22 triumph averaged 123.4 million viewers, topping Fox's short-lived record of 115.1 million set one year ago, and earning bragging rights as the most-watched TV program in history. And while every ratings result is effectively hung with an asterisk in the out-of-home era—officially untallied before fall 2020, OOH enhances vanilla TV deliveries by way of the tens of millions of once-overlooked impressions that get served up at Super Bowl parties, bars and restaurants—the new way of counting the house in no way invalidates CBS' accomplishment.
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Of that garish total, 120 million tuned into the game via the flagship CBS broadcast network. The Nielsen data is based on fast-national deliveries; as such, there should be very little adjustment to the totals when the final live-same-day data is released tomorrow.
As was the case with Chiefs' 2023 win over the Eagles, Patrick Mahomes last night proved that he's absolutely lethal when playing from behind. Last year, the QB threw two touchdown passes in the fourth quarter and then gimped his way to a 26-yard gain that set up the game-winning field goal. This time around, Mahomes needed a full extra period to get the job done, sewing up his third NFL title (and MVP nod) with a 13-play, 75-yard drive that culminated with a pitch-and-catch to receiver Mecole Hardman in the near corner of the endzone.
In keeping with head coach Andy Reid's unassuming gastronomic enthusiasms, the name of the play that broke the Niners' backs was "Corn Dog."
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As much as Mahomes' unreasonable excellence is a bummer for Bills, Bengals and Ravens fans, the data suggests that viewers are slow to weary of an NFL dynasty. After all, Tom Brady became almost nightmarishly ubiquitous over the course of his long career, and the Patriots' Super Bowl deliveries never wavered. In fact, if OOH deliveries had been blended into the ratings currency back in 2017, Nielsen's unofficial estimate for the Pats-Falcons game in 2017 (126.3 million viewers) would stand as the highest turnout for any broadcast in the history of TV. But since OOH wasn't recognized as a viable metric at the time, the 26.6 bonus impressions don't count toward Fox's recorded viewership total.
Additional intel about CBS' OOH deliveries will be made available on Tuesday.
If the addition of OOH deliveries has made for apples-to-bocce-balls comparisons between the last four years of Super Bowl broadcasts and the first 54 games, an obsessive approach to keeping track of the various inconsistencies is arguably a pointless mental exercise. While past Super Bowl ratings go a long way toward determining how subsequent games will be priced, there is no penalty for underperformance. The Super Bowl is one of a very, very few televised events for which the size of the audience is not guaranteed; as such, the networks get to pocket nearly all of the half-billion-dollars-plus in ad revenue they generate during the Big Game.
Mahomes' late-game heroics would give the NFL its first repeat champion in 19 years and put Reid's squad firmly in the "dynasty" conversation. After Harrison Butker hit a 29-yard chip shot to knot the score at 19 with just three ticks on the game clock, Super Bowl LVIII became only the second title tilt to spill outside the standard four-quarter container. The bonus frame brought in bonus eyeballs; the CBS audience peaked at the end of the OT period.
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That the high-water mark coincided with the confetti snow angels (and Travis Kelce 's clinch with his world-famous girlfriend) is predictable enough, although Sunday's NFL broadcast may well have been the first of the season to get a quantifiable boost from a legion of Swifties. As exaggerated as the so-called Taylor Swift effect was throughout the fall, the Super Bowl has always been must-see TV for a whole lot of people who limit their NFL consumption to just one game each year. (And yes, people who only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials are just as valid as those who spend 12 hours in front of the set every autumn Sunday; for the advertisers who paid $7 million for each commercial slot, the fact that as many nearly half of the audience cannot distinguish Chuck Knox from Chuck Noll is wholly immaterial.)
If Kansas City's latest spasm of sorcery is bad news for the rest of the NFL—the 2023 offensive unit was by far the weakest of the Mahomes era, and yet the team still managed to nail down another championship—the ratings suggest that the novelty is in no danger of wearing off. Much of that fascination has to do with Mahomes himself, whose every move is equally captivating and somehow unsettling. Watching Mahomes impose his will on a defense is a bit like watching an octopus escape from a locked aquarium, inasmuch as his every action seems informed by an implacable alien intelligence. The dude is downright uncanny , and at 28 years of age, he may not even be at the top of his game.
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