Primetime got the famous teams. Sunday Ticket got the good ones.

Methodology

How this was measured

Every number on this page is produced by one script in the data pipeline, build_broadcast_quality.py, from the same fixtures the rest of the site runs on. Nothing here is typed in by hand except the Journal's own figures, which are quoted, the names of thirty markets, and the four games called out on the reach chart. A test pins the figures the copy states, so a data refresh that moves one of them is a visible change rather than a silent one.

The games

All 272 regular-season games of 2025, from the schedule fixture built off ESPN's public schedule: 198 CBS and FOX regional Sunday afternoon games, and 74 games in national, Monday night, international and holiday windows. A game is regional when its network is CBS or FOX and the schedule does not mark it national. The 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern windows are read off the kickoff time: 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. is early, 3:30 to 6 p.m. is late.

The preseason matchup rating

The site's own quality model, the one behind every “games worth watching” count on the advisor. It scores a game out of 100: up to 40 points for the two teams' combined previous-season win percentage, 10 for a division rivalry, 10 if either team made the previous postseason, up to 15 from the betting line's view of the matchup, up to 10 for a standout storyline, and 15 for a national broadcast. The storyline term is the model's one judgement call and is capped at 10 of 100. The national-broadcast bonus is removed here, so a game on NBC and a game on FOX at 1 p.m. are rated on the matchup alone; the maximum is therefore 85. The ratings are rebuilt from the fixture's inputs and checked against the shipped scores.

How the teams finished

The average of the two teams' 2025 win percentages from the standings entering Week 18, the last week every team had played the same number of games. A game between two 12-4 teams scores 75%; a game between a 13-3 team and a 3-13 team scores 50%. This is a blunt measure on purpose: it asks only whether the game turned out to involve good teams, with no allowance for strength of schedule, injuries or the state of the race at kickoff.

Indexing the windows

Each broadcast window's average rating is divided by the league-wide average of all 272 games and multiplied by 100, once for the preseason rating (38.1 points league-wide) and once for the final records (50% league-wide). The two indexes are the two ends of each dumbbell. A window whose preseason index is far above its finished index bought games that looked better than they turned out.

Reach

Which regional game each market's CBS and FOX stations carried each week comes from archived weekly coverage maps, the same archive behind the site's Coverage Explorer, drawn from 506sports' weekly maps. A game's reach is the share of the U.S. population living in markets whose stations carried it, with market populations summed from 2020 Census ZIP code tabulation areas. A national game reaches everyone. Coverage maps describe which game a station planned to carry; a late switch after the map was drawn is not in them.

Streaming and cable games in a home market

A game on Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock, ESPN or NFL Network is counted as paid everywhere except the two participating teams' home television markets, where the league requires a free over-the-air simulcast. A Patriots fan in Boston watches a Thursday night game on a local station; a Patriots fan in Denver needs Prime Video. Home markets come from the same ZIP-to-market table the advisor uses.

Stand-alone games

A team's stand-alone games are its games outside the CBS and FOX regional Sunday windows: NBC, Prime Video, ESPN and ABC on Monday, NFL Network, Netflix, YouTube, Peacock, and CBS and FOX on holidays and Saturdays, counted once for each team in the game. For earlier seasons, where the schedule fixture is not carried, a team's stand-alone count is its 17 games minus the regional games the coverage maps recorded for it.

The 30 best games

All 272 games ranked by how the two teams finished, with the preseason rating breaking ties. For each market, every one of the 30 is placed in one of three bins: free, for an over-the-air broadcast the market received; streaming or cable, for a paid national window outside both home markets; or only on Sunday Ticket, for a regional game the market's stations did not carry. “The typical American” is the population-weighted average of those bins across all 243 markets, which is why it carries a decimal.

Free slots and the four fans

Every regional Sunday game a market's CBS and FOX stations carried is one slot. Each network has one window for every regional game it airs: two on a doubleheader Sunday, one on a single-window Sunday. Across 18 weeks the two networks had 56 such windows in 2025, so a fully recorded market got 56 slots. A market's free slate is the average combined final win percentage of the teams in the games it received; the games it did not get are the regional games its stations did not carry. The four fans are real markets chosen for their situation: Portland, Oregon, with no team of its own; Las Vegas, home of the 2-14 Raiders; Seattle, home of the 13-3 Seahawks; and New York, home of the 3-13 Giants and 3-13 Jets. In each week's strip, the best game the station did not carry is the highest-rated regional game, by final records, that the market's stations skipped that week.

The map

Each dot is one of the 243 markets, placed at the population-weighted centre of its ZIP prefixes and sized by population; every market in the table falls inside the frame. Shading is the market's free slate in five bands. Markets with a home team are named for it; the thirty markets the text discusses carry a place name; every other market is labelled by its lowest ZIP prefix, because the fixtures carry no city names.

Earlier seasons

Regional games for 2022 through 2024 come from the same weekly coverage maps and the same standings fixture. Populations are held at current Census figures across all four seasons, so a reach figure moves only when a station's choice moved. The Journal counts Sunday Ticket's games its own way, so its 191 for 2025 differs from the 198 regional games the maps show; the trend section uses the maps throughout.

What was excluded, and why

The coverage archive carries rows marked “unobserved” and “no game” for weeks a market was not recorded or a window was empty. Counted as games they would have put the regional count at 217 instead of 198, and every reach and stand-alone figure off them would have been wrong; they are excluded. Four ESPN Monday doubleheader games aired regionally on ESPN or ABC and are left out of the reach chart, since no map covers them. For 38 small markets, 2.7% of the population, the maps skip some weeks; those markets' averages cover the games recorded.

Sources

Schedule and standings from ESPN's public API, weekly coverage from 506sports, market populations from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 ZIP code tabulation areas, and the Sunday Ticket game count, prices and the Patrick Crakes quotation from The Wall Street Journal, “NFL's Sunday Ticket Is Getting Smaller. It Isn't Getting Cheaper.” (Joe Flint, September 13, 2026). Coverage-map data is used under the terms on 506sports; ZIP boundaries and centroids are Census Bureau public data.