Imagine, if you will, a scenario in which the newly crowned NFL sack king Myles Garrett is tasked with teaching the Muppets about the fundamentals of football, and you’re maybe about a quarter of the way toward appreciating the league’s almost cartoonish dominance over what remains of the American monoculture. Picture the 6’ 4”, 272-pound collection of fast-twitch muscle fibers bearing down on Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his eternally harried lab assistant, Beaker, in a hands-on demonstration of the ouchiest branch of Newtonian physics—MEEP!—and you’ve got yourself an analogy that’s been all done up in distressed felt and crushed ping pong balls.

It ends badly for all of Kermit’s showbiz pals. A blindside hit reduces Fozzie Bear to a muddied scrap of area rug, while whatever’s left of Miss Piggy will get hosed off Garrett’s cleats and redirected to the Wilson plant in Ada, Ohio. Up in the balcony, even Statler and Waldorf have stopped cracking wise. Scooter had a family!

If entertainment fare has long been shut out of the annual list of America’s biggest TV and TV-adjacent events—the last time a scripted show found a toehold among the top 100 was in 2019, when the series finale of The Big Bang Theory scared up 18.5 million viewers—the NFL also has made short work of much of its sports competition. Having accounted for 83 of the most-watched transmissions in 2025, the Shield put up its second-best numbers on the books, trailing only its run from two years ago, when it nearly ran the table with 93 entries. (A surging college game helped put this year’s football tally at an even 90 entries.)

For all that, the real hero of the 2025 list may well be Nielsen. As much as the NFL kicked off the season by suggesting that the audience for such tentpole events as the Super Bowl and the Thanksgiving Day slate have been undercounted, an upgrade of the company’s methodology—especially as it pertains to an expanded out-of-home sample—has gone a long way toward putting such concerns on pause. (Executives have been complaining about Nielsen practically since it began its 75-year reign as the currency czar, but no pretender yet has managed to supplant it as the underwriter of the $70 billion-and-change TV ad market.)

On the day the jaw-dropping ratings for the Thanksgiving games were released, NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder gave Nielsen props for beefing up its OOH scrutiny, noting that the efforts to track these impressions in all U.S. TV markets helped “capture the viewership in a more accurate way.” CBS’ Chiefs-Cowboys broadcast averaged 57.23 million viewers, smashing the previous regular-season record by 36%. Strip away all the holiday co-viewing that took place across the nation and CBS’ Tryptophan Bowl turnout would have been closer to 35 million.

And while TV execs rarely make an effort to shout out Nielsen, Fox’s Mike Mulvihill wasn’t stinting in his praise. “Nielsen takes a lot of criticism in this business, but you have to give them credit for the fact that through their rollout of out-of-home measurement, the scorekeeping in this business has finally caught up to the reality,” Fox Sports’ president of insights and analytics told reporters during the post-Turkey Day media scrum. “Sports does have [the power] to bring us together and facilitate shared experience, and the numbers finally reflect the reality that’s been in place for many, many years, and it’s a welcome change.”

The impact of the new method of counting the house is perhaps best appreciated by looking back to the 2023 list. While last year’s top 100 was a bit of an outlier, thanks to a frenzied presidential election cycle, the 2023 tally is particularly instructive when you start digging into the back portion. The cutoff for our latest list was 17.39 million viewers, whereas the count from two years ago halted at 15.03 million viewers. Transpose the 2023 data with the current chart and the bottom quarter drops off into the void. In other words, the new-look Nielsen has helped recapture a sufficient volume of impressions that 27 of the broadcasts that made the cut two years ago wouldn’t have been eligible for inclusion in today’s ranking.

If the Nielsen data should go a long way toward ensuring that the NFL will continue to maintain most, if not all, of its legacy TV partnerships—during the post-Thanksgiving huddle, Schroeder made a point of crediting “the power … and reach of broadcast TV” for doing a lot of the heavy lifting—the streaming giants are an increasingly invasive species. Events that were exclusive to streaming platforms accounted for eight of the 100 items on the list, up from three in 2024, and nearly all the trad TV broadcasts were enhanced by a non-linear simulcast. (Peacock and other digital outlets now account for 11% of NBC’s Sunday Night Football deliveries, up from 5% just a few years ago.)

For all that, an argument can be made for the exclusion of at least one streaming event, as the stateside audience for Netflix’s presentation of the Sept. 13 Canelo Alvarez-Terence Crawford bout was determined without any input from Nielsen. Netflix’s self-reported deliveries are derived via a sort of mysterious alchemy, as the company’s results are a function of the marriage of its own in-house figures and estimates from VideoAmp. As there’s no way to audit these results, the Netflix numbers radiate a heady “trust me, bro” vibe. That said, gatekeeping kept last month’s mandible-shattering Jake Paul fiasco off the list, as Netflix declined to break out the fight’s U.S.-only numbers.

Drop the unverifiable boxing deliveries, and the NFL has bragging rights to 84 of the top 100 events on the list. That quibble aside, sports all but gobbled up the entire chart, as 95 of the items on the list were devoted to football, baseball, basketball, horseracing and boxing. Political events and news programming ran off with 16 of the top spots in 2024, but in the absence of a collar-grabbing quadrennial circus, only three Beltway spectacles carved out space on this year’s chart. The other two non-sports entries were NBC’s presentation of the 99^th installment of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and ABC/Hulu’s staging of the Oscars.

As far as individual results are concerned, the humbled Kansas City Chiefs grabbed 18 spots on the 2025 list, eclipsing their dynasty-disrupting foes the Philadelphia Eagles (14) and the ever-popular Dallas Cowboys (13). Among the networks, Fox earned top marks with 26 appearances, edging NBC (23) and CBS (22), while Disney siblings ESPN and ABC combined to take 19 of the top slots. The NFL, meanwhile, drummed up 19 of the year’s 20 biggest audiences and 46 of the top 50.

Lastly, Major League Baseball staged a welcome return to the upper reaches of the list, as the final frame of Fox’s epic Dodgers-Blue Jays Fall Classic claimed the No. 25 slot. The power of a World Series Game 7 is hard to overstate, even when one of the teams involved has no stateside representation; by comparison, the 2024 Yankees-Dodgers showdown topped off at No. 84 with 18.15 million viewers. A seventh broadcast featuring the reps of the two largest media markets likely would have crashed the top 10, but New York’s farcical fifth-inning meltdown in Game 5 robbed Fox of a potential ratings bonanza.

As for the big-time sporting events that failed to secure a berth in 2025, the NBA Finals fell short despite drawing 16.61 million viewers with Game 7, leaving the league out of the winner’s circle for the sixth straight year. Women’s college basketball failed to repeat its top 100 performance of a year ago, although the men’s game returned to the fold care of CBS’ coverage of the Florida-Houston title tilt. The Kentucky Derby also stormed back onto the list after a three-year layoff, as nearly 18 million people in funny hats (including 959,000 streamers) cheered on Sovereignty’s muddy victory, a turnout enhanced by Nielsen’s OOH upgrade.

Lastly, 2025 saw a rare loss for a Super Bowl lead-out, as Fox’s broadcast of the Season 3 premiere of the Rob Lowe-helmed game show The Floor served up a record-low 13.94 million viewers, this despite the 127.71 million sets of eyeballs that were in place during Philly’s big win over KC. While nothing will ever unseat NBC’s remarkable 1996 showing—the one-hour episode of Friends that aired immediately after Super Bowl XXX notched a now-unthinkable 52.93 million viewers—as the keeper of the Muppets flame, ABC could put up some big numbers in 2027 if they were to give Kermit & Co. the coveted post-Super Bowl LXI slot.

Throw a rampaging Myles Garrett into the mix, and ABC might even have a shot at beating its most recent Super Sunday mark, a special installment of Grey’s Anatomy that drew 37.8 million viewers in 2006 after the Steelers topped the Seahawks in Detroit. Bear in mind that Pittsburgh’s victory “only” delivered 90.75 million viewers; given the new Nielsen currency and the league’s unwavering expansionist tendencies, we’ll likely never again see an NFL championship game dip below the 100 million mark.

For anyone out there still trying to compete with the NFL for the hearts and minds of the American consumer, the only valid response to the league’s latest showing can be summed up in a single interjection: MEEP!