ESPN and CBS went head-to-head for the biggest audience during Week 17 of the NFL regular season. Both delivered around 26.1M viewers, marking a milestone for the NFL as the league has now seen almost double the games cross the 25M threshold as last year (when only nine had met that mark by this time).
Monday Night Football — which actually aired on Saturday to give deference to college football on Monday — delivered its second consecutive week of an audience over 26M viewers for the controversial contest between the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys.
That game joins the Eagles-Chiefs (November 20) and Ravens-49ers (December 25) from this season as the three most-watched MNF games since 1997.
The current season is now officially the most-watched MNF season of the ESPN era (since 2006), averaging 17.1 million viewers.
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