Cris Collinsworth made a notable, bluntly honest quip last year about NFL broadcast scheduling that got a lot of attention.
“If NBC had their choice, we would do 17 Dallas Cowboys games,” the NBC “Sunday Night Football” analyst told “The Dan Patrick Show.” “I’m not kidding. It doesn’t even matter what their record is. They could be 4-6, we would take them. ‘You guys can take any game you want this week.’ ‘OK, we’ll take the Dallas Cowboys.’ It’s insanity, but it’s true. They draw the ratings.”
Historically, this is unquestionably true. The Cowboys have been the NFL’s viewership bell cow for decades, and there’s a reason every network lobbies the league’s broadcasting department for as many Cowboys games as possible. Take this year’s schedule: The Cowboys have six prime-time slots for 2o24 as well as five weeks where they anchor Fox’s late-afternoon Sunday window, a late-afternoon Thanksgiving Day game (against the New York Giants) on Fox, and a game coming Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles that anchors CBS’ late-afternoon window.
But the Cowboys are struggling, with a middling 3-5 record and starting quarterback Dak Prescott looking at multiple weeks on the sidelines. They are hardly a compelling watch at the moment outside of seeing how long the slide continues.
So stay with me for a moment as I argue that the Kansas City Chiefs, and not the Cowboys, deserve the title of “America’s Team” as far as a network viewership play in the near term. In some ways, the change might have happened already as the NFL selected the Chiefs for its newest deep-pocketed partners — Amazon’s Black Friday game (against the Las Vegas Raiders) and one of Netflix’s Christmas games (against the Pittsburgh Steelers).
For example, let’s take a look at the 10 most-watched games this year, per the NFL:
1. Chiefs–Baltimore Ravens (Week 1): 29.2 million viewers on NBC
2. Cincinnati Bengals–Chiefs (Week 2): 27.9 million viewers on CBS
3. Cowboys-Ravens (Week 3): 27.3 million viewers on Fox
4. Chiefs–San Francisco 49ers (Week 7): 27.1 million viewers on Fox
5. Chiefs–Atlanta Falcons (Week 3): 25.1 million viewers on NBC
6. Chicago Bears–Washington Commanders (Week 5) (airing in 51 percent of country); Chiefs-Raiders (airing in 41 percent of country): 25 million viewers on CBS
7. Detroit Lions–Green Bay Packers (Week 9): 24.2 million viewers on Fox
8. Los Angeles Chargers–Chiefs (Week 4): 24.2 million viewers on CBS
9. Cowboys-Lions (Week 6): 24.1 million viewers on Fox
10. Cleveland Browns–Cowboys (Week 1): 23.9 million viewers on Fox
For a quick comparison, here were the five most-watched NFL regular-season games, excluding Thanksgiving, in 2022 — when the Cowboys went 12-5 and earned a wild-card spot in the playoffs:
1. Cowboys-Packers (Week 10): 29.2 million viewers on Fox
2. Cowboys-Eagles (Week 16): 27.8 million viewers on Fox
3. Cowboys–Minnesota Vikings (Week 11): 27.7 million viewers on CBS
4. Bengals-Cowboys (Week 2): 27.4 million viewers on CBS
5. Tampa Bay Buccaneers-Packers (Week 3): 26.4 million viewers on Fox
Look at all the Chiefs games in this year’s top six. The team’s recent run — four Super Bowl appearances in the last five years and a 59-16 record since the start of the 2020 season — has prompted the NFL to place them in high-profile windows. They were the primary reason CBS finished last year with its most-watched season since 1998 (an average of 19.3 million viewers) and how CBS edged out Fox (24.64 million to 24.62 million) in the 2023 late-afternoon window battle.
Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs’ season-opener against the Ravens is the highest-rated game of the NFL season so far. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
This year, CBS has seven Chiefs games, NBC has four (including three prime-time games), ESPN has two, Fox has one, Netflix has one, and Prime Video has one. There is an open game Week 18 against the Broncos that will likely head to a big window. Kansas City plays five times in the late-afternoon slot, the most valuable real estate on television.
Management at all these networks should be advocating heavily for the Chiefs above all other teams, including the Cowboys, for their 2025 schedule. Dallas will still get its heavy share of prime-time games and high-profile windows, but the Chiefs will end up with higher-profile windows, including (just a hunch here) more than one game on Fox.
But William Mao, the senior vice president of global media rights consulting at Octagon, says, well, not so fast, cowboy.
“I think the Cowboys are still a big draw, so if you’re asking whether they will continue to consistently be, as you called it, the network’s No. 1 pick, it remains to be seen,” Mao said. “Do the Chiefs as a dynasty change things, and particularly at this moment in time given they are undefeated? The counterpoint is there was another dynasty before the Chiefs in the (New England) Patriots, a long dynasty with multiple championships. I don’t recall during that period of time there was a thought that they would supplant the Cowboys from a pick and flexing perspective on the scheduling. There is something to be said about longstanding brand building and the brand value of teams as opposed to just kind of how someone did the prior season. Generally speaking, the Cowboys are usually on in pretty much the entire country.”
Mao asked analysts at Octagon’s sister agency, Futures Sport & Entertainment, which looks at international media monitoring and has done measurement work for the NFL, to provide a global look at where the Cowboys remain in the age of the Chiefs. He said the findings came back that the Cowboys remain the NFL’s most popular team.
“Across all the markets that Futures monitors, the Cowboys remain the top NFL team in popularity regardless of their results,” Mao said. “There’s brand value to them that is a little bit immune to the week-to-week performance and record.”
Both of us are in agreement that Kansas City will be the bigger television draw down the stretch given the current trajectories and the fact the Chiefs are on a historical run. What was interesting from Mao is that he observed that the Chiefs, given all their success and prominent star players such as Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, benefit from hate-watching. (They do have a famous fan who famously sings about how the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.)
“Fandom has two edges to it,” Mao said. “There is this notion of I love this team because they are playing well or they have these star players. There’s also the negative side of fandom, which is we watch them because we want to see if they’ll lose, or because we hate them. I think the Chiefs benefit from both of those in the same way the Patriots once did.”
GO DEEPER
He called Patriots games during the dynasty years. What’s the job like now?
(Top photo of Dak Prescott and Patrick Mahomes meeting after a 2021 game: Cooper Neill / Getty Images)