Eagles

The NFL Walloped the NBA on Christmas Day

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Dec 29th, 2022 · 9:05 AM EST

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With Christmas falling on a Sunday this year, we had the NFL and NBA going head to head:

NFL and NBA viewership numbers from the Christmas games:

NFL:
– Packers-Dolphins: 25.92M
– Broncos-Rams: 22.57M
– Bucs-Cardinals: 17.15M

NBA:
– 76ers-Knicks: 4.04M
– Lakers-Mavericks: 4.33M
– Bucks-Celtics: 6.03M
– Grizzlies-Warriors: 4.70M
– Suns-Nuggets: 2.49M

— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) December 28, 2022

The NFL is still king, but we already knew that. Football will beat anything it goes up against.

Somewhat surprising, however, is the gap. These weren’t exactly marquee NFL matchups, with five of the six teams playing on Sunday coming into the day with losing records. The Rams throttled the Broncos and still got 22.5 million viewers while Tom Brady vs. Trace McSorley featured three of the worst quarters we’ve ever witnessed, yet still pummeled the Bucks/Celtics game by more than 10 million.

Certainly, it’s still early in the NBA season, and there’s not much on the line when you haven’t made it to the halfway point of an 82-game schedule. The NFL plays 17 games, so a less-saturated football slate will always garner more attention per individual game, but if you watched any of the basketball on Sunday, you know those games were more competitive and probably more compelling in a single-game vacuum than anything on the NFL slate. And those basketball numbers honestly aren’t horrible considering they were going H2H straight up against the country’s most popular sport.

Anyway, further proof here that the NFL is way out in front.