57 Million and Counting: How Thanksgiving Became the NFL’s Unofficial Super Bowl

Thanksgiving 2025 delivered the most-watched regular-season game in NFL history when 57.23 million people tuned in to watch the Chiefs face the Cowboys, shattering the previous high of 42 million set in 1993. Add the streaming peak of 61.357 million on Paramount+ and the numbers become almost absurd. What began as a quirky tradition in 1966 has quietly evolved into the closest thing the NFL has to a national holiday Super Bowl, an event no other league dares challenge and no network will ever surrender.