Sunday’s games made history. The TV ratings, somewhat surprisingly, did not.
According to Austin Karp of SportsBusiness Daily, the Rams-Saints NFC title game garnered an overnight rating of 27.1 on FOX. That’s the lowest number for the 3:00 p.m. ET window on Championship Sunday since 2013, when 49ers-Falcons racked up a 26.1.
FOX is wisely comparing the ratings not to the 3:00 p.m. ET window, but to last year’s Vikings-Eagles game in the evening window. Under that metric, FOX had a 10-percent increase over last year’s prime-time blowout.
The news was much better for the later window. According to multiple reports, the Patriots-Chiefs contest on CBS drew a 31.2 overnight rating. That’s the highest overnight rating for Super Bowl play-in game since early 2012, when the Giants and 49ers on FOX generated a 33.4 overnight rating.
Both games went to overtime, the first time ever that two NFL postseason games played on the same day weren’t settled at the end of regulation.