One of the patterns we saw during COVID-19 was that TV sports numbers were way down. The World Series, NBA Finals, and Stanley Cup Finals all took a plunge.

Presumably, there just wasn’t a lot of juice for bubble finals played with a number of teams that didn’t come from traditionally big media markets. The Dallas Stars, Tampa Bay Rays, and Miami Heat just didn’t seem to move the needle for neutrals.

We’re conditioned to think that the NFL is impervious to decline, but regular season ratings were slightly down this year, about 7%. That trend carried into the Super Bowl, according to Dominic Patten at Deadline:

In figures released this morning by CBS Sports, the big game had a total audience of 96.4 million viewers on CBS and a bundle of platforms and outlets, according to Nielsen.

Confirming the suspicions that many had even going into the match-up between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs, that is the least watched Super Bowl in recent history.

With around 90.8 million viewers on CBS alone, the 2021 Super Bowl is still the most watched show of the past year. With a 10% fall from what Fox had on its broadcast network last year, the 55th Super Bowl had the smallest network audience since the very different era of 2005.

John Ourand at the Sports Business Journal is reporting that 5.7 million viewers watched via stream while the TV-specific number is about 91.6 million.

The NFL is still king; this just confirms that TV ratings for all sports are down across the board.

For some context, the Super Bowl TV number hasn’t dipped below 96.4 million viewers since 2007, when the Colts played the Bears. The Eagles’ win over the Patriots pulled a 103.47 on NBC and the Rams/Pats snoozefest of 2019 did a 98.48 number on CBS.

Interestingly enough, Boston numbers were up huge for this SB, according to Ourand:

Bunch of snowed-in Patriots fans watching their guy win his 7th ring with another team.