Usually, the first game of wild-card weekend is expected to be a clunker, relative to the rest of the slate. This year, Rams-Panthers was anything but.
The 34-31 shootout, with four leads changes in the fourth quarter alone, racked up 28 million viewers on Fox. It was a seven-percent bump over last year’s early Saturday wild-card game between the Chargers and Texans on CBS and Nickelodeon, and the biggest audience for the Saturday afternoon wild-card game since Saints-Seahawks in January 2011.
The quality of the Rams-Panthers game helped overcome the reality that the Panthers were viewed as playoffs ratings poison, with an 8-9 record and a division title earned with a Week 18 loss followed by the Falcons beating the Saints the next day.
If the game had gone like last year’s 32-12 win by Houston over L.A., the number for Rams-Panthers likely would have been a lot lower.
