ºüÀêÊÓƵans continue to have a chief interest in the NFL team on the other side of the state.
On Jan. 21, Kansas City beat Buffalo in a tense battle that wasn’t decided until the Bills missed on a late-game field-goal attempt that could have tied the contest. Nielsen, which tracks viewership, reports that 31.9% of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ market watched CBS’ telecast of that one — on local affiliate KMOV (Channel 4). That was the nation’s third-highest rating, trailing only the cities of the teams competing in the game.
That victory propelled the Chiefs into last Sunday’s AFC title game vs. Baltimore, which they won, albeit in less-scintillating fashion than in their victory over Buffalo. KC opened a 14-7 lead less than 19 minutes into the game and there were just two field goals over the final 41 minutes as the Chiefs prevailed 17-10.
Top-rated AFC title game markets
Rank | Market | Rating | Share |
---|---|---|---|
1. | Kansas City | 50.9 | 92 |
2. | Baltimore | 41.5 | 80 |
3. | Buffalo | 37.7 | 71 |
4. | Pittsburgh | 34.4 | 70 |
5. | Richmond-Petersburg, Va. | 32.9 | 67 |
6. | Cincinnati | 32.8 | 67 |
7. | ºüÀêÊÓƵ | 32.1 | 71 |
T8. | Ft. Myers-Naples, Fla. | 32 | 66 |
T8. | Louisville | 32 | 66 |
10. | Dayton, Ohio | 31.6 | 64 |
ºüÀêÊÓƵ again responded with a huge rating — 32.1% of the market watched, on KMOV. But while that figure was slightly higher than what the area generated for KC’s previous game, it came in seventh nationally. Of course, KC and Baltimore (41.5) led the way. ºüÀêÊÓƵ — a city twice jilted by NFL teams and a town in which many of its residents claim to disdain the league — nonetheless finished ahead of 25 of the NFL’s 30 markets in ratings for the game. In addition to Kansas City and Baltimore, only Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati drew a better rating than the Gateway City.
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The only non-NFL market to beat ºüÀêÊÓƵ was Richmond-Petersburg, an area in Virginia that’s not far from Washington and is big Commanders territory.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ did top a list in one statistical category Nielsen uses in its viewership analysis. While the “rating†is the percentage of the entire market that is watching, the “share†narrows the tabulation to only measuring people who are watching television at the time. KC led the way in share, with a mammoth 92% of the market that had a TV on then tuned to the contest. The figure in Baltimore was 80%.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ tied Buffalo for No. 1 among all other cities, as 71% of those who were watching TV while the Chiefs-Ravens game was taking place were tuned to the game.
Unlike much of the nation, the Chiefs game rated better in ºüÀêÊÓƵ than did San Francisco’s stunning comeback victory Sunday for the NFC crown in a contest that was played in the more ratings-favorable later time slot. Despite the midafternoon start, KC’s local rating of 32.1 was 23% better than the 26.2 figure KTVI (Channel 2) pulled for the NFC contest. That rating was 23rd nationally. Detroit was first (46.3) followed by Kansas City (34.6). San Francisco came in seventh (30.5).
Blasting the Blues
The AFC title game is believed to be the top-rated program to be shown in ºüÀêÊÓƵ since last year’s Super Bowl, and it annihilated the Blues in local TV ratings for the hour and 45 minutes the games overlapped on Sunday afternoon.
From 2 p.m. to 3:45 p.m., football on KMOV averaged a 29.8 rating, and hockey on Bally Sports Midwest was at 1.9. That’s more than a 15-1 difference.
Of course, a Super Bowl berth was on the line for the Chiefs, who are immensely popular locally at least in terms of TV viewership, and the Blues were playing a midseason contest against the Kings — not one of their big rivals.
Nonetheless, the Blues beat all the local broadcast TV stations other than KMOV, as well as ESPN, while they and the Chiefs were playing simultaneously. Each of those five other outlets were being seen by less than 1% of the market then, Nielsen said.
Nationally speaking
The NFL has ruled all of television, not just sports, for many years, and its domination continued Sunday when the league’s two conference title games drew a combined audience of more than 112 million nationally.
The KC-Baltimore matchup drew 55.5 million, a record for the AFC finale. Then the Detroit-San Francisco contest followed with 56.7 million — the biggest NFC title tilt audience since Giants-49ers pulled in 57.6 million a dozen years ago.
But it is important to note that Nielsen only measured in-home viewership before 2020. So now that it includes people watching in public places such as bars and restaurants, many viewership comparisons to pre-2020 events are apples to oranges.
There have been 12 NFL postseason games to date, 11 of which have been shown nationally on broadcast television. Those 11 averaged 38.9 million viewers. The one that was not, the Kansas City-Miami first-round matchup that was exclusively streamed by Peacock outside the markets of the competing teams, drew 23 million.
Peacock owner NBCUniversal reportedly paid $110 million for those rights, then charged those who did not already receive the service a minimum of $5.99 to get the game as part of a one-month subscription. The idea was to have those football viewers stick around and sample other Peacock programming in the hopes they would become long-term customers.
The league and NBCUniversal loudly trumpeted the fact that the production smashed streaming viewership records. But the bottom line is it was the least-watched game among the six wild-card round contests played over a long weekend, which included a Monday afternoon contest in Buffalo that had been pushed back a day because of weather concerns.
Including the games played since then, the streamed-only contest drew almost 16 million fewer viewers than the ones shown over-the-air averaged.
Meanwhile, Congress’ House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology had a hearing this week in Washington to better familiarize itself with how sports media rights work, including the impact streaming is having.