Updated June 15, 2026. Originally published December 2017 — refreshed with the 2018–2026 NFL ratings recovery, the Al Michaels-to-Mike Tirico booth transition, the Peacock streaming simulcast, NBC's $1.1B-per-year rights deal through 2033, the Taylor Swift / Travis Kelce halo effect, and the broader context that what looked in late 2017 like a permanent decline turned out to be the bottom of a cycle.
With only a few weeks left in the 2017 regular season, it was official: 2017 had been a down year for Sunday Night Football, one of the NFL's most prominent national TV audience productions. Part of that downturn was the games. National NFL viewers just didn't get as "up" for, as an example, Ravens v. Steelers as they used to. Even a down-to-the-wire 39 to 38 nail-biter couldn't put viewers in front of the TV.
It hadn't helped that the Cowboys and Giants were both having terrible years. That fact was telling — the 2016 Sunday night matchup between the Giants and the Cowboys had been the biggest regular season primetime game since Thanksgiving 2015. The 'not so secret' secret in late 2017 was that the NFL was hurting for ratings overall. NBC, CBS, and ESPN games were all down. Fox saw a small bump, nothing structural. The narrative at the time was that the league was in trouble.
One reason for the downturn was that top players were hurt or out. The Dolphins, Giants, Packers, and Cowboys were among several top-draw teams that struggled to find wins with big-name starters on injured reserve. Eli Manning was benched in New York, further enraging frustrated fans. Without their quarterbacks the Dolphins and Packers were tough to watch, and the Cowboys without Ezekiel Elliott were outclassed in their own division. But that was the "reason" most observers didn't want to accept. The competing narrative was about player protests, presidential tweets, and a polarized audience turning the TV off.
What Actually Happened Next
2017 turned out to be the bottom of the cycle, not the start of a permanent decline. The narrative at the time read the data as structural — political polarization, cord-cutting, the death of appointment television. Eight years later, the data reads differently.
NFL ratings recovered through 2018, plateaued through the COVID years, and then accelerated. The 2024 NFL regular season averaged approximately 17.5 million viewers per game across all networks — the highest-rated season in nearly 30 years. Sunday Night Football specifically held its position as the most-watched primetime show on U.S. television for the fourteenth consecutive season heading into 2025, a streak no other program in the broadcast era has ever matched. The 2017 thesis — that the audience had moved on — was wrong.
The structural factors that drove the recovery: continuous schedule flexing by NBC to land the best matchups, the league's introduction of more divisional and rivalry primetime slots, the parity-driven competitiveness across the league, the Patrick Mahomes-era Chiefs as a sustained ratings draw, and — beginning in late 2023 — the Taylor Swift / Travis Kelce halo that pulled a significant new female demographic into NFL broadcasts. The kneeling controversy faded as a ratings factor by 2019. The 2017 framing of politics-as-permanent-driver did not survive the data.
The Booth and the Rights Deal
The Sunday Night Football booth changed in 2022 when Al Michaels moved to Amazon's Thursday Night Football and Mike Tirico took over play-by-play alongside Cris Collinsworth on color. Tirico had been positioned as Michaels' successor for years. The transition was clean. The booth still anchors the broadcast — Collinsworth's analyst credibility is the structural asset that no rival booth has matched.
NBC's Sunday Night Football rights deal — part of the league's 2021 media rights package — runs through the 2033 season at approximately $1.1 billion per year. Peacock now simulcasts every SNF game, and the streamer's exclusive playoff game in January 2024 (Chiefs–Dolphins) became the most-streamed event in U.S. history at the time, accelerating Peacock's subscriber growth. The 2017 question of whether the SNF franchise could survive cord-cutting has been answered: NBC built the streaming bridge before the cord-cutting hit.
The Broader Sports Broadcasting Landscape
The NFL's distribution architecture in 2026 is the most fragmented in the league's history — and the most lucrative. CBS has the AFC Sunday afternoon package. Fox has the NFC. ESPN/ABC has Monday Night Football. Amazon Prime Video has Thursday Night Football exclusively (since 2022, with a 10-year deal through 2032). Netflix has Christmas Day games. YouTube TV has Sunday Ticket. NBC and Peacock have Sunday Night Football and select streaming exclusives. Five distribution platforms. One sport. The total NFL media rights value of approximately $113 billion across the 2023–2033 cycle is by far the largest in sports broadcasting history.
The PR work behind sustained NFL ratings is the work of mass-cultural sponsorship anchoring — the same dynamic EPR has documented in PR Tips from Three Mass-Market Industry Experts — Tesla, Nissan, and Honda, where Nissan's 13-year Heisman House campaign and the brand's title sponsorship of the Heisman Trophy demonstrate how a single category-defining auto sponsor can extract more earned-media value from NFL-adjacent broadcasts than any 30-second spot ever delivered.
What the 2017 Piece Got Right and Got Wrong
Right: the 2017 SNF ratings drop was real. The Cowboys-Giants weakness was real. The injury wave was real. The audience-fragmentation pressure on broadcast television was real.
Wrong: the conclusion that "the NFL is hurting" as a structural condition. The league wasn't hurting structurally — it was experiencing a cyclical low. Eight years of subsequent ratings data have made that clear. The 2017 commentary cohort that called the end of the NFL was reading a moment as a trend. The trend, in the data we now have, ran the other way.
The structural lesson for sports PR operators is durable. Ratings cycles are not strategy verdicts. Single-season declines that look catastrophic in real time often look like noise five years later. The work of a sports broadcasting communications operation in 2026 is to maintain sponsor confidence and audience narrative through cyclical lows without overcorrecting strategy to chase a temporary pattern.
Sports PR and the NFL Surface in 2026
The strongest sports PR firms in 2026 operate at the intersection of league communications, sponsor activation, broadcaster relations, and player marketing. Established names in the category include Ketchum Sports, DKC PR, Edelman Sports, Taylor (the global agency), Octagon (Interpublic), and Wasserman. The agency-side work on a Sunday Night Football broadcast spans pre-game narrative seeding, sponsor activation through Peacock streaming integration, player-driven social content, and post-game amplification across X, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube.
The audience surface that didn't exist in 2017 — the AI engines now answering "best NFL game of the week," "what to watch Sunday night," "Travis Kelce news" — is now an additional layer where sports PR operators compete for citation share. The mechanics of that competition are documented in EPR's 2026 Automotive AI Citation Share Study (whose sponsor-side findings translate directly to sports broadcasting) and Reddit for Auto (whose Reddit-as-source-corpus dynamic applies identically to r/nfl, r/fantasyfootball, and the team subreddits).
Frequently Asked Questions
What were Sunday Night Football ratings in 2017? 2017 was a down year for SNF, with average viewership declining from the franchise's recent highs. The decline was attributed at the time to weak primetime matchups (Cowboys, Giants struggling), star-player injuries, and political polarization. Subsequent data showed 2017 was the bottom of a cycle rather than the start of a permanent decline.
Did NFL ratings recover after 2017? Yes — substantially. The 2024 NFL regular season averaged approximately 17.5 million viewers per game across all networks, the highest-rated season in nearly 30 years. Sunday Night Football has been the most-watched primetime show on U.S. television for fourteen consecutive seasons heading into 2025.
Who calls Sunday Night Football now? Mike Tirico (play-by-play) and Cris Collinsworth (color) since 2022. Tirico succeeded Al Michaels, who moved to Amazon Prime Video's Thursday Night Football package the same year.
What is NBC's Sunday Night Football rights deal worth? Approximately $1.1 billion per year, running through the 2033 season as part of the NFL's 2021 media rights package. Peacock simulcasts every SNF game.
How does the Taylor Swift / Travis Kelce factor affect NFL ratings? Swift's attendance at Kansas City Chiefs games beginning in September 2023 pulled a measurable new female-demographic audience into NFL broadcasts. The "Taylor Swift effect" added an estimated 1–2 million viewers to specific Chiefs broadcasts and contributed to the 2023–2024 ratings acceleration.
This piece is part of Everything-PR's coverage of sports broadcasting, NFL communications, and mass-market PR. Related: PR Tips from Three Mass-Market Industry Experts — Tesla, Nissan, and Honda.
