Sunday NFL Ratings Fall 13% as Irma Slams Into Florida
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Just hours before the NFL kicked off its first Sunday of game-day action in 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall in the Florida Keys as a Category 4 storm, plunging millions of Sunshine State residents into darkness and sending millions more scrambling to the Weather Channel and CNN.
While the league hoped a strong Week 1 schedule would help wash away the overarching narrative of last season, when ratings dropped 8 percent, Irma had other ideas. According to Nielsen live-plus-same-day ratings, all local and national TV windows (i.e., the 1 p.m. ET broadcasts on CBS and Fox, the Fox late-national game and NBC’s “Sunday Night Football”) were down 13 percent in total viewers compared to the year-ago results.
One of the two high-profile Sunday games managed to reverse the curse, however, as NBC’s prime-time Giants-Cowboys broadcast averaged 24.4 million viewers, marking a 6 percent increase compared to last year’s analogous Pats-Cardinals game, which drew 23.1 million viewers. Dallas’s 19-3 rout of the G-Men averaged a 13.4 household rating, up 2 percent versus last year’s 13.1 rating.
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