Street and Smith’s Sports Business Journal has released their annual piece showing the Top 100 most-watched telecasts of the year and the 2021 list includes a game in which our Detroit Lions participated (and lost).
The Lions game, as you can probably guess, was the Thanksgiving Day matchup against the Chicago Bears. According to SBJ, that game comes in at No. 13 on the list with 26.75 million viewers.
From SBJ:
Sports in 2021 dominated the most-watched telecasts in the U.S. like never before, accounting for 95 of the top 100 programs. That figure is up from 92 two years ago and a significant increase from just 75 last year, in which political programming cut into sports’ overall dominance.
Among those 95 sports telecasts in 2021, 75 were NFL games — Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers accounted for 11 of those, including five of the top 15 — and 11 were from the Tokyo Olympics; the 2016 Rio Games had 14 of the top 100.
