Packers-Seahawks highest-rated Thursday night game in nearly two years

Thursday night’s Week 11 kickoff game, between the Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks, promised to be a good one — it was the seventh meeting between the franchises since 2012, and most of them have been close affairs, including the 2014 NFC championship and the 2012 Fail Mary regular-season game.

On Thursday, the Seahawks may have ended Green Bay’s playoff hopes, overcoming a 14-3 deficit at the end of the first quarter, holding the Packers to just three second-half points and grabbing a 27-24 win.

And there were a lot of televisions tuned in to see it all.

Highest-rated TNF game in two years

Austin Karp of Sports Business Daily tweeted on Friday morning that the game had done an 11.9 overnight rating for Fox. It was the highest-rated “Thursday Night Football” game for Fox this season.

It was also the highest-rated Thursday night game on any network in almost exactly two years; Karp said the Dallas Cowboys-Minnestoa Vikings Week 13 game, which was a 17-15 Dallas road win broadcast by NBC, was the last to rate so highly.

Big night for Fox

Karp went on to post that ratings like that are why Fox ponied up big money for Thursday night rights. Fox’s overall rating for the night in primetime was 11.1, more than the other three major networks drew combined: CBS, which has popular comedies “The Big Bang Theory”, “Young Sheldon” and the “Murphy Brown” reboot among its Thursday night offerings, drew a 5.1; ABC goes drama-heavy on Thursdays with “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Station 19,” and “How to Get Away with Murder,” and drew a 3.7.

NBC’s mix, with “Superstore,” “Will & Grace” and the enduring “Law & Order: SVU,” drew just a 2.2 rating.

Package was costly, but worth it?

Earlier this year, it was announced that Fox had reached a five-year deal with the NFL for “Thursday Night Football”, paying a whopping $3.3 billion.

That’s an average of $660 million per season, and with Fox only getting 11 TNF games this season, that’s a cost of $60 million per game.

But when you can go to potential advertisers and show them the type of ratings numbers Fox got this week, you can also charge a pretty penny for commercial time.

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