National Football League TV ratings continue to set what the networks state as records on Sundays, three weeks into the 2025 season, and NASCAR continued a corresponding swoon.
The Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sunday drew an average of 1.29 million viewers for a 0.70 share on USA Network. This is down from 1.79 million and a 0.96 for the fourth playoff race of the season last year, which happened to be at Kansas Speedway.
While NASCAR has no shortage of homework to do when it comes to establishing new stars and marketability, it’s also reasonable to point out the increasing NFL rating this year, continuing a record start for the league across each of its networks.
For example, the FOX Sports portion of Sunday football drew an average of 25,473,000 viewers, which was up 15 percent from last year’s average viewership.
Another nuanced caveat is that Nielsen is using its new Big Data + Panel measurement system, which captures audience retention from 75,000 digital devices and 45,000 TV homes, which means there isn’t a perfect year-to-year comparison.
In other words, the NFL’s Sunday gains comes with a caveat, as do NASCAR’s losses, as the methodology from Nielsen has shifted from 2024-to-2025 after using its previous methodology from 2020-to-2024.
