Super Bowl Viewership Tops 100M For NBC & NFL With LA Rams’ Hometown Win

There was a lot of California Love flying around Super Bowl LVI on Sunday as the hometown Los Angeles Rams beat the Cincinnati Bengals in a nail-bitter game punctuated by a halftime show of West Coast hip-hip icons. Part of that legacy will be much desired reversal of viewership fortune after years of decline for the NFL’s big game.

With a post-game on-field marriage proposal from Rams safety Taylor Rapp to now-fiancée Dani Johnson, the scene at the packed SoFi Stadium was pretty much exactly what NBC and the NFL were praying for. Even while Eminem took a knee during the halftime show in homage to expelled Colin Kaepernick’s past protests against racism and police violence, the rest of the gridiron extravaganza was picture perfect for the broadcaster and the league.

Add to that having a team from one of the top television markets in the nations was a bonus, as was the lack of a blowout, which plagued last year’s Super Bowl on CBS. Certainly a historic halftime line-up of Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar & Eminem, plus surprise guest 50 Cent didn’t hurt either. Still, victory for Rams QB Matthew Stafford and teammates looked in doubt up until the final minutes of the 3:30 PM PT starting game. Lagging behind the Bengals, a successful pass to receiver Cooper Kupp put the guys ahead and some strategic moves by lineman Aaron Donald sealed the deal in the closing seconds.

Needless to say, even with a significant number of Bengals fans among the celeb heavy 70,048 in attendance at the shining Inglewood venue, SoFi exploded when the final whistle went off.

That translated into big numbers at home and elsewhere as well. The 2022 Super Bowl scored more than 100.2 viewers according to Nielsen data from NBC and Telemundo.

Cracking that 100 million ceiling, the burly Super Bowl LVI viewership is very nice bounce from the total audience of 96.4 million viewers on CBS and a plethora of platforms and outlets that the Tampa Bay-hosted Super Bowl LV had in early February last year. In fact, with an audience of about 91.6 million on the ViacomCBS-owned network alone, the 31-9 win by now-retired Tom Brady and the Buccaneers over the Kansas City Chiefs was the least watched Super Bowl in nearly two decades.

More metrics from Peacock and other platforms and outlets is expected later today from NBC Sports. Based on recent Super Bowl trends and the strong season the league had overall, those streaming numbers will likely be record breaking. We’ll update when that data is available.

Still, with 99.18 million watching the game this year on the linear network alone, NBC is denied the bragging rights of having beaten their own viewership results from the last time the network hosted the Super Bowl in 2018.. That 41-33 win by the Philadelphia Eagles  over the New England Patriots snagged 103.4 million sets of eyeballs on NBC, a nine-year Super Bowl low at the time.

In a pre-Peacock era, when views from NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app, NBC.com TV Everywhere, Universo, En Vivo app, NFL.com, NFL Mobile from Verizon, the Yahoo Sports app, and go90 were added in, Super Bowl LII had total viewership of 106 million.

Of course, even with up-ticking ratings and viewership for the NFL this pandemic modulated season, NBC wasn’t supposed to even have the Super Bowl this year. Back in 2019, the Comcast-owned swapped Super Bowl slots with CBS so they could have the big game the same year as NBC  had the 2022 Winter Olympics. So, CBS got the lackluster 2021 game and NBC had a sports full deck.

Based on the Super Bowl LVI viewership, it looks like a winning hand.

With the 2022 Winter Olympics struggling to find a strong audiences on either linear TV or streaming, Sunday’s Super Bowl surely provided a nice launch pad into NBC’s Mike Tirico-hosted Beijing games coverage, which directly followed the pro-football face-off.

Even before the official Nielsen numbers were out, the robust result for Super Bpwl LVI was an almost sure thing. Amidst all the other elements, Samba TV, which tracks programming and advertising viewing via smart TV data, put out data on Monday that household viewership was up 12% from last year. Based on linear and streaming data from their cauldron of 46 million “opted in devices,” the San Fran-based company also had the halftime show rising 19% from 2021’s performance by The Weekend.

Next year sees the Super Bowl on Fox for the first time since 2020. Super Bowl LIV in Miami drew 102 million viewers on the Rupert Murdoch-owned net, Fox Deportes and Fox, NFL and Verizon’s digital properties. After this year, that big number suddenly looks a little smaller.

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