Cowboys Thanksgiving win against Giants was most-watched regular season game ever

Nov 25, 2022 - 11:30 PM

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This last week has been filled with all sorts of winning for the Dallas Cowboys.

First off, they defeated the Minnesota Vikings by a score of 40-3 and did so on the road making it more impressive. In fact, it’s properly impressive given that the 37 points that Dallas won by were the largest margin of victory ever for them during a road win in franchise history.

A quick four days later the Cowboys were at it again. While they were a bit off in the first half against the New York Giants, ultimately Dallas stabilized and moved to 8-3 on the season. They will now end the month of November with some well-earned rest and relaxation ahead of next Sunday’s game against the Indianapolis Colts.

That Colts game will come under the bright lights of Sunday Night Football so a lot of people will watch the Cowboys play (what a shocker). However many tune into NBC next week may not touch the number that watched Dallas rock their throwbacks on Thanksgiving Day in winning fashion. According to FOX, a staggering 42 million people tuned into the game.

FOX notes here that Thursday’s Thanksgiving Day game between the Cowboys and Giants was the most-watched regular season game on any network ever. That truly is insane to think about.

What is a bit interesting here though is that the game was up 49% over last year’s Thanksgiving Day game on FOX. In case you were unaware FOX and CBS alternate every year between covering the Cowboys and Detroit Lions on Turkey Day. Obviously that means FOX was in Detroit a season ago.

Reading between the lines that tells us that this year’s Cowboys/Giants game was up 49% over last year’s FOX game which was the Lions hosting the Chicago Bears. And this year’s Cowboys/Giants game was up compared to last year’s “comparable window” which was the Cowboys hosting the Las Vegas Raiders on CBS.

So what that really tells us is that FOX increased in viewership 49% by having the Cowboys as opposed to the Lions this year and that the time slot itself performed about as expected with a slight growth (it certainly did not hurt to have a New York team involved from a market standpoint). There is no doubt that Thanksgiving is a holiday revolving around football and while that may be the case, it is very clearly a holiday revolving around the Dallas Cowboys playing football specifically.

America’s Team.