Championship Sunday: Ratings for AFC game up, but ratings for NFC game down

The overnight ratings are out for the NFL conference championship games, and there’s good news and not-so-good news for the league.

We’ll start with the good first.

AFC game does big numbers

The AFC championship, which was aired on CBS in the later window, with a 6:40 p.m. ET kickoff, did huge numbers.

CBS Sports public relations tweets that the rating was 31.2, or 53.9 million million viewers. That’s up 26 percent from the late window in 2018, the NFC championship between the Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings (that drew a 24.7), and the highest-rated show on television in essentially a year.

Sports Media Watch wrote that it’s the highest overnight rating for a conference championship game since the 2016 Patriots-Broncos game (31.8), and the third-highest AFC title game rating since 1987.

Early window numbers down

Via Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, the NFC championship game between the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints drew a 27.1 overnight rating, or roughly 31.2 million viewers. The game was aired by Fox in the earlier window, with a 3:05 p.m. ET kickoff.

In 2018, the AFC championship between the Jacksonville Jaguars and New England Patriots drew a 27.3 in the earlier window; the conference championships flip kickoff times each year.

Rams-Saints had the lowest rating for the early window since 2013, which was the NFC title matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and Atlanta Falcons.

More from Yahoo Sports:
• Wetzel: Tom Brady’s message to Patrick Mahomes
• Report: Pacquiao may have suffered serious injury
• Controversial OT rule costs Chiefs chance vs. Patriots
• The Rams know it was a bad call. And no, they don’t care.

Subscribe to The Yahoo Sports NFL Podcast
Apple Podcasts• Stitcher • Google Podcasts