Deadspin takes a look at the NFL’s regular season games and comes up with a ranking of how popular or “watchable” they were.
Tough year for Monday Night Football. ESPN’s most watchable game (Packers-Seahawks) was a publicity disaster for the NFL, and other than that the network got stuck with a bunch of high-profile blowouts. NBC got six top-50 games for its Sunday night slot, including the flexed Week 17 super-matchup between the Cowboys and Redskins, the seventh-most watchable game of the year.
The AFC sorted itself out a lot quicker than the NFC this year, meaning that Fox games were 7 percent more watchable than CBS games. Also not a great year for the NFL Network, which proved incapable of choosing good games and got stuck with just three in the top 100: Steelers-Titans (25th), Chiefs-Chargers (75th), and Buccaneers-Vikings (96th). Short-rest football: maybe a bad idea.
They rank the top five best and worst games of the season and watchability by week. All in all it’s a decent ranking. The data is available on Google Docs for your own sorting.