You Need to Calm Down With All the Taylor Swift-NFL Ratings Hype
As much as the NFL and its network partners have embraced the whole Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce thing, the impact of the singer’s sudden fascination with Andy Reid’s four-minute offense has been largely overstated. While the production truck’s 17 cuts to Swift and her celebrity entourage helped boost NBC’s overall deliveries on Sunday night, the TV turnout for the surprisingly close Chiefs-Jets game would’ve been massive even without all the pop window dressing.
The primetime meeting of the Super Bowl champs and the No. 1 media market’s AFC rep averaged 24.8 million linear-TV viewers, with streaming deliveries bringing the full audience numbers up to 26.7 million. This marks a 20% increase compared to the year-ago Chiefs-Bucs broadcast, a 41-31 shootout in which Patrick Mahomes’ arsenal prevailed over Tom Brady’s crew. By any metric, NBC’s numbers were outstanding; finishing just shy of its Sept. 7 NFL Kickoff Game audience (27.5 million), the most recent installment of Sunday Night Football gives the network bragging rights to the two most-watched games of the season thus far.
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Given NBC’s big linear lift—the TV audience for the Chiefs-Jets game was up 19% year-over-year, good for a gain of 3.98 million total viewers—it stands to reason that Nielsen would record a concomitant boost in the number of women who tuned in. Indeed, such was the case, as NBC reached 1.9 million more women than they did in the year-ago SNF window. But when those additional female impressions are weighed against the overall gains in total viewership, the number of [presumably] Swift-generated lookers-on works out to be a bit lower—around 1.45 million.
In terms of overall audience composition, Sunday night’s audience was only slightly more female-skewing (38%) than any other typical SNF gathering, as the primetime games generally serve up a 36-64 gender split.
Now, nobody’s going to turn away nearly 1.5 million wholly unanticipated viewers, who collectively gave NBC what amounted to a 5% lift out of thin air. Other sports would maim for that sort of sudden windfall; if 1.5 million additional women suddenly started tuning into Sunday Night Baseball because, say, Aaron Rodgers started dating Rihanna, that would effectively double ESPN’s MLB ratings. But with the NFL’s unparalleled reach, the Swifties in the SNF audience are the proverbial drop of rain in the ocean. Even if they hadn’t gathered in front of the set in a weird show of fealty to their queen, NBC could still lay claim to two of the season’s three most-watched NFL games.
If the Jets perhaps are not quite the draw they were poised to be with Aaron Rodgers under center, Gang Green’s gritty performance went a long way toward giving NBC the sort of audience they were expecting when the NFL slotted this game in the fourth Sunday night window. If not for a questionable defensive-holding call levied against corner Sauce Gardner late in the fourth quarter, Mahomes would have coughed up three interceptions, and the Jets may have served up the biggest regular-season upset since the winless 2020 squad bumped off the Rams at SoFi Stadium in December 2020.
By keeping things close, however (the final score was 23-20), New York all but guaranteed a blockbuster night for NBC. With an average draw of 26.2 million viewers per game in three national appearances, the Chiefs are the NFL’s biggest draw, while Gotham’s base of 7.73 million TV homes makes for an optimal ratings environment. (Even without Rodgers, the Jets remain must-see TV on the home front, as local affiliates are currently enjoying a 69% ratings gain compared to last season.) Throw in a game that kept fans tuned in until the final whistle, and the “Swift lift” is so much coal to Newcastle.
If some of the reporting around Taylor Swift’s new hobby has flirted with the preposterous—CNN on Monday declared that NBC “unquestionably owes its record numbers to Swift,” despite the fact that a) no records were set, and b) Swift’s actual impact was less than earthshaking—the influx of younger female viewers is worth noting, regardless of its predictable impermanence. But again, for all the hoopla over the singer’s pied-piper influence over the nation’s youngest consumers, the effect on the NFL’s TV deliveries is largely overstated.
Per Nielsen, the Chiefs-Jets game averaged 620,000 girls 12-17, or 137,000 more than NBC averaged with its year-ago Chiefs-Bucs broadcast, a boost that’s about 8% higher than what the network could expect to have notched without all the attendant Swift hysteria. If precedent is any guide, Taylor will move on, and Travis Kelce will probably want to avoid the radio for a while. The NFL’s newfound audience is likely to go with her.
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