Super Bowl LVI cracked the 100-million viewer mark in a turnaround from viewership of last year's big game, marking a strong finish to an NFL postseason rife with late-game drama and thrilling finishes.
Per NBC Sports, the Los Angeles Rams' 23-20 win over the Cincinnati Bengals drew an average audience of 112.3 million, including 101.1 million TV viewers and another 11.2 million streamers. The game was available on NBC, Telemundo, Peacock, NBC Sports Digital, NFL Digital and Yahoo Sports mobile properties. It ranked as the most-watched program in five years since Super Bowl LI, featuring the New England Patriots' improbable comeback win over the Atlanta Falcons, drew 113.7 million.
The viewership for the Rams-Bengals game was roughly a 10-percent jump from the audience that watched the Tampa Bay Buccaneers topple the Kansas City Chiefs in last year’s Super Bowl.
Viewers apparently weren't drifting away at halftime, either. The Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show averaged 103.4 million viewers from 8:15 to 8:30 p.m. ET, and Telemundo's first-ever Spanish-language Super Bowl broadcast averaged 1.9 million sets of eyeballs.
It should come as little surprise that the numbers were up, given the competitiveness of most of this year's playoff games. Before meeting in the Super Bowl, the Rams and Bengals nipped their previous two playoff opponents by just three points each. Earlier in the postseason, the 49ers knocked off the Green Bay Packers in the Divisional Round, 13-10, and the Buffalo Bills took the Chiefs to overtime in perhaps the most exciting playoff game of them all. True to form, the Super Bowl proved to be yet another three-point nail-biter as the Bengals took a 20-16 late into the fourth quarter until the Rams' Cooper Kupp caught a 1-yard touchdown pass with under two minutes remaining for the game-winning points.
Cincinnati topped local-market viewership with a 46.1/84 rating, while the Los Angeles ratings were not in the national top 10 at 36.7/77. Other local markets in the top 10 included Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus (Ohio), Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia and Jacksonville.
