Could Chiefs and Cowboys Missing Playoffs Slow NFL Ratings Train?

The NFL has been on a roll TV-wise, with the league on track for its best viewership since 1989. But if there’s anything that could put a dent in The Shield’s gaudy ratings, it’s the absence of star quarterbacks—as well as its top two TV draws in the Chiefs and Cowboys.

With three weeks to go in the 2025 regular season, top players and teams are dropping like flies. That doesn’t bode well for media partners CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix, which are paying billions to carry the league’s games.

• Pour one out for the Chiefs dynasty. Kansas City was officially eliminated from the postseason this week. Patrick Mahomes, the face of the league, is out for the season after tearing his ACL. The two-time MVP had led K.C. on a historic run, with three Super Bowl wins, five Super Bowl appearances and seven straight trips to the AFC title game. The new America’s Team played in four of the five most-watched games this season and six of the top ten. Without Mahomes, the 6–8 Chiefs will be a shell of themselves as they play the Titans on CBS in Week 16 and the Broncos on Netflix on Christmas Day. These playoffs will be the first since 2014 without the Chiefs. 

• Bad news for fans of the original America’s Team: The 6-7-1 Cowboys are almost mathematically eliminated. Dallas has fallen behind K.C. as a TV attraction, but the ’Boys still draw eyeballs. Cowboys-Chiefs on Thanksgiving Day was the most-watched regular-season game in history, averaging an eye-popping 57.3 million viewers. The Cowboys have still played in three of the top ten most-watched games this year.

• As TV talking heads remind us ad nauseam, the NFL is a QB-driven league. Besides the loss of Mahomes, the league will likely enter the playoffs without several leading men who’ve driven strong viewership in the past. Joe Burrow’s 4–10 Bengals and Jayden Daniels’s 4–10 Commanders are eliminated; Washington has also shut Daniels down for the season due to elbow injuries. Lamar Jackson’s Ravens are on the bubble.

• You could argue the NFL’s decades-long run to the top of American sports was driven in large part by seven star QBs: Mahomes, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Aaron Rodgers, Eli Manning, and Brett Favre. But get ready for a changing of the guard this postseason. As my colleagues at Front Office Sports noted, this will be the first postseason without Mahomes, Brady, or Peyton Manning since 1998. Network TV executives tell me it took several years for ratings to recover from the retirement of Peyton Manning—the league’s most popular player—in early 2016.   

• That leaves Jackson, reigning league MVP Josh Allen, and four-time MVP Aaron Rodgers as the most famous QBs left in the mix. The cupboard won’t exactly be bare. There are Super Bowl champion Jalen Hurts and Drake Maye of the surprising 11–3 Patriots; Caleb Williams, Bo Nix, Jordan Love, Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, Sam Darnold, Baker Mayfield, C.J. Stroud, and Matthew Stafford are all in playoff position. But with the exception of the 42-year-old Rodgers, none of them have the box office appeal of Mahomes, Dak Prescott, or Burrow.

It’s a simple equation, notes Stephen Battaglio of the Los Angeles Times. The NFL is one big TV show, and big-name QBs are the headliners. Even the notorious 8% viewership drop in the 2016 season, which many variously blamed on politics and viewers being pulled over to news, was also driven by Manning’s retirement and Brady’s four-game suspension for Deflategate, he says. Despite their promise, many younger QBs are not box office draws. Yet. 

“Quarterbacks are the stars of the NFL show,”  Battaglio says. “The new generation of them have yet to achieve household name status.”

If everything were equal, sports TV ratings expert Douglas Pucci of “Programming Insider” might expect a ratings decline this postseason. But Nielsen’s adoption of Big Data + Panel is inflating ratings. Pucci also likes that Los Angeles and Chicago, the nation’s second- and third-biggest TV markets, will have skin in the game.  

“While the NFL playoffs will feature teams like Jacksonville, either Carolina or Tampa Bay, New England, Houston, it might seem likely that ratings would take a hit compared to previous years,” says Pucci. “But with the recent implementation of Big Data by Nielsen, we may even see an increase although it would be compared to only figures of recent years.”

As far as the remaining QBs in the dance, Pucci likes the appeal of comeback kid Darnold of the Seahawks. If the 8–6 Colts can make the playoffs, he’d love to see what kind of national audience tunes in for the emotional comeback of 44-year-old grandfather Philip Rivers. 

“That would be my number-one storyline,” says Pucci. 

NFL games are averaging 18.7 million viewers across TV/digital through Week 14. That’s up 7% from the same point last year and the highest Week 14 average since 1989.