The Kansas City Chiefs have advanced to the seventh-consecutive AFC Championship Game for the seventh year in a row following their 23-14 win over the Houston Texans in the Divisional Round.
With their dominance, in addition to the social media uproar from fans that they once again received far too many favorable calls from the referees on Saturday, you would think that people are sick of their dominance. Well, according to ESPN’s viewership numbers, think again.
Texans-Chiefs Sets New Viewership Record for ESPN
For the second year in a row, ESPN broke its own viewership record for an NFL game since first airing NFL games on its network in 1987.
According to ESPN, the network averaged 32.7 million viewers for Texans-Chiefs on Saturday, and they expect that number to surpass 33 million when the final Nielsen reports come out later this week.
This marks the second year that ESPN has had the broadcast rights to a Divisional Round playoff matchup, and they each broke the previous viewership record for an NFL game. Last year, Texans vs. Ravens delivered an average of 32.3 million viewers, surpassing its previous high of 31.2 million — a Wild Card Round matchup between the Cowboys and Buccaneers from the season before.
Of ESPN’s eight-most watched NFL games ever, only three of them took place during the regular season. The highest viewership of those three regular season games was the Super Bowl LVII re-match in 2023 between the Eagles and Chiefs.
For ESPN, perhaps the most encouraging theme among these eight games is that only one of them wasn’t called by their current broadcast team of Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, and Lisa Salters.
After years of shuffling their booth following the departures of Mike Tirico and Jon Gruden, ESPN struggled to find strong replacements for the former play-by-play and color commentators for Monday Night Football.
In 2022 however, ESPN signed Buck and Aikman to take over the MNF booth after their 20-year run as one of the NFL’s strongest broadcasting duos at Fox. Since then, Buck and Aikman have continued to shine, and have helped ESPN deliver a much-improved MNF product, their most important asset.
