Despite blowout, record-low primetime broadcast overnight, Thursday Night Football still beats ALCS, NBA Opening Week
Despite a blowout, a matchup between two unappealing teams, *and* a record-low overnight rating for a primetime game, Thursday Night Football on Fox and NFL Network still came out as the top sports program on Thursday night. That comes in spite of strong competition from Game 5 of the ALCS on TBS, and an NBA Opening Week doubleheader on TNT.
Per
Sports Media Watch, the TNF game between the Broncos and Cardinals
drew a 6.6 overnight, down a whopping 33% from 2016’s fourth TNF simulcast (Broncos-Chargers) and 2017’s Week 7 TNF game (Chiefs-Raiders). The 6.6 is also the lowest overnight for a primetime game on a broadcast network, a mark that has stood since 2008 (Seahawks-Bucs, which drew a 7.2 on NBC’s Sunday Night Football).
But the NFL is a monster, and despite everything working against the league on Thursday night, it still dominated its nearest sports competition, which came not from ESPN or NBC, but from Turner. Game 5 of the Red Sox-Astros ALCS on TBS
drew a 5.0 overnight, up 28% from Game 5 of the NLCS last year on TBS and marking the best LCS Game 5 overnight for TBS in a decade. However, nearly a third more people ended up watching the NFL than MLB on Thursday.
TNT’s NBA doubleheader also didn’t put up much of a fight. The network didn’t report overnights for the Bulls-76ers game in the early slot (and you can make of that what you will), but Lakers-Blazers in the late window (which competed with a chunk of the second half of TNF)
drew a 2.6 overnight. That’s a 63% spike from the second half of last year’s Opening Week Thursday doubleheader (Lakers-Clippers), but a hell of a lot lower than the overnight TNF drew.
