When FOX agreed to a five-year, $3.3 billion deal with the NFL to televise Thursday Night Football, some saw it as an overly costly investment in a product whose ratings were declining. But after the first year of Thursday night NFL games, FOX has to be pleased with the results.
Austin Karp of SportsBusiness Daily reports that last night’s Chargers-Chiefs game delivered a 12.4 overnight rating, the second best Thursday Night Football overnight rating of the season, and a whopping 68 percent increase over last year’s Week 15 Thursday night game.
With this year’s Thursday night schedule now over, that puts FOX’s Thursday Night Football ratings at 7 percent higher than last year, when the package was split between NBC and CBS. (NFL Network has always simulcast the Thursday Night Football package.)
Generally speaking, the Thursday night games seemed to be better this year than last year, not so much because the NFL put together a better schedule (no one could have predicted when the schedule came out in the spring that Chiefs-Chargers would be such a great game), but because the football has been better across the board this year. That’s why ratings are up on Sundays and Mondays, too.
