A jam-packed day of sports on Christmas turned out to be a huge ratings success for both the NFL and NBA. <\/p>\n
The NFL easily won the day with an average of 22.9 million viewers for all three games, including a streaming-record 27.5 million watching the Detroit Lions-Minnesota Vikings game on Netflix. <\/p>\n
The NBA’s quintuple-header drew more than 47 million total viewers across all five games, including a peak of 6.7 million watching the San Antonio Spurs defeat the Oklahoma City Thunder. <\/p>\n
One area where the NBA did claim victory over the NFL was social media. The league\u00a0touted<\/a>\u00a0its 1.6 billion views across all platforms as the most of any brand on Christmas Day.<\/p>\n This marks the second consecutive year that the NFL has held a Christmas Day doubleheader on Netflix. The 2024 games featuring the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens vs. Houston Texans\u00a0averaged<\/a>\u00a026.5 million viewers.<\/p>\n The schedule set up this year for the NFL to have a tripleheader since Christmas Day fell on Thursday, which already has a Prime Video game in the evening.<\/p>\n Even though the Prime Video game between the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs lost some luster with Patrick Mahomes out due to a torn ACL and the Chiefs out of playoff contention, it still set a Thursday Night streaming record with an average of 21.1 million viewers.<\/p>\n The first three NBA games averaged more than 6 million viewers. For comparison, the Los Angeles Lakers’ win over the Golden State Warriors was the only Christmas Day game in 2024 to\u00a0average<\/a>\u00a0at least 6 million viewers.<\/p>\n The Lakers game against the Houston Rockets this year was only the fourth-most watched NBA matchup of the day (5.4 million viewers). It was the first game of the season between LeBron James and Kevin Durant.<\/p>\n It certainly didn’t help the viewership for the game that Houston built an early lead and stretched it to 23 points midway through the third quarter. The Broncos-Chiefs game that was going on at the same time was surprisingly competitive even though Kansas City was down to third-string quarterback Chris Oladokun as its starter.<\/p>\n Denver escaped Arrowhead Stadium with a 20-13 win thanks to RJ Harvey’s go-ahead touchdown with 1:45 remaining in the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n Any concerns that the NFL putting more games on Christmas Day would lead to issues for the NBA have proven to be unwarranted. The head-to-head scheduling on Dec. 25 will continue for at least one more year since the NFL’s\u00a0current contract<\/a>\u00a0with Netflix, which includes a deal for at least one Christmas game, runs through 2026. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A jam-packed day of sports on Christmas turned out to be a huge ratings success for both the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-381391","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-nfl","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}