Seahawks Rout Rams & ‘Thursday Night Football’ Ratings Take Another Hit

I couldn’t say Los Angeles might want to ditch its new NFL team already after the Rams’ terrible performance last night. And we’re certainly not praising the worst-superhero-movie-you’ve-ever-seen hand-me-downs that the Seattle Seahawks were wearing because, honestly, the NFL has bigger problems — and not just The Big Bang Theory (3.3/13) beating it in the ratings Thursday.

With Seattle’s 24-3 victory clinching the NFC West title once again, Thursday Night Football took a tumble. The NBC and NFL Network broadcast scored a 10.1/17 in metered market results on a night that saw Fox in encores, the CW showing the iHeartRadio Jingle Bell 2016 special (0.4/1),  and ABC mostly repeats.

While not a low, last night’s TNF early results are down 13% from last week, which was down 16% from the week before – and welcome to the trend of the 2016-2017 NFL season. Looking at the 7.9 that the game got on just NBC, that’s also a drop of 13% from the Kansas City Chiefs’ 21-13 win over the Oakland Raiders on December 8. In unadjusted fast affiliates, last night’s game drew a 2.7/10 among adults 18-49 on NBC, with 10.04 million watching. That’s a decline of 27% from last week’s numbers that went up to a 5.6/20.

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Big teams like the Dallas Cowboys or the New England Patriots provide ratings jolts, but otherwise things are middling at best and declining on average – week after week and year-to-year — and blowouts like last night are proving a major factor as data shows viewers turn off when the suspense is gone.

While the league insists it is committed to TNF , we’ll get a fuller sense of how the franchise has done on its inaugural run on NBC with next week’s New York Giants-Philadelphia Eagles match up, NBC’s TNF finale.

Still, with its 2.6/8 rating and audience of 9.87 million overall, NBC will easily win the night.

With a birth on The Big Bang Theory starting off CBS’ night of comedies with its last original of 2016, it was a celebration of sorts on the House of Moonves. The top show of the night currently, the science geek series rose 6% among the key demo from its last original and saw viewership up 8% to 15.77 million – its biggest audience since this year’s season premiere on one of the biggest show on TV.

The rest of CBS’ night had The Great Indoors (1.7/6) and Mom (1.5/5) up 13% and 7%, respectively, in the demo with their best viewership numbers of the season with that baby bump, so to speak. Life In Pieces (1.3/5) was even with last week and the struggling tech-fueled drama Pure Genius (0.9/3) was a bit of a buzz kill with the drop of a tenth. ABC’s The Great American Baking Show (0.8/3) was also down a tenth for the net from last week.