Tom Brady's Return to New England Is Most-Watched 'Sunday Night Football' Game in 9 Years

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Tom Brady’s Return to New England Is Most-Watched ‘Sunday Night Football’ Game in 9 Years

by Tony Maglio and Jennifer Maas | October 4, 2021 @ 1:39 PM

Bucs’ win over Patriots draws 27.2 million viewers on NBC

Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ victory over the New England Patriots last night marked NBC’s most-watched “Sunday Night Football” game since 2012, according to Nielsen.

The game, which marked Brady’s return to his old home, Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, averaged approximately 27.2 million viewers on NBC, with a national TV household rating of 14.6, per those time-zone-adjusted numbers.

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Brady’s win over his old team, which also streamed live on Peacock, drew a Total Audience Delivery (TAD) of 28.5 million viewers across NBC, Peacock, NBC Sports Digital, and NFL Digital platforms.

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The Bucs’ 19-17 victory against the Patriots is projected to have the largest audience for a “SNF’ game since Week 17 of the 2012 season, when Dallas faced Washington in a win-and-in game for the NFC East title (30.3 million viewers), and the second-largest since “SNF” debuted on NBC in 2006.

See below for the top metered markets for the Buccaneers-Patriots “Sunday Night Football” game, based on the 44 measured. The Top 4 should come as no surprise to any geography major.

Florida markets Jacksonville (No. 6) and West Palm Beach (No. 9) also made the Top 10.

1.	Providence	45.1/73
2.	Boston	43.8/70
3.	Tampa	27.1/51
4.	Hartford	23.9/44
5.	Cincinnati	21.2/40
6.	Jacksonville	20.9/39
7.	San Diego	20.8/43
8.	Cleveland	20.4/39
9.	West Palm Beach	20.1/38
10.	Las Vegas	19.8/38

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Below, we’ve included the Nielsen numbers we received earlier on Monday, which are not adjusted for time zones. At the time, NBC was in first place with a 5.2 rating among adults 18-49 and 19.3 million total viewers, though we knew those numbers would only go up, up, up as Nielsen adjusted that initial snapshot for the different time zones.

We do not yet have adjusted data for CBS, ABC, Fox and The CW. Though really only CBS, which had *some* football trickle into primetime, should adjust materially — though not as dramatically as NBC. Final data for the remainder of Sunday primetime will come out on Tuesday.

For now, CBS finished second with a 1.1 rating and 6.3 million total viewers. Following NFL football, the network aired a “60 Minutes” episode featuring Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.