NBC is hoping to use its top-rated Sunday Night Football to give Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show a lift this autumn. The network announced four special Sunday broadcasts of the late-night show, set to air after NFL games and local news, aiming to capture the massive football audience.
Two of the episodes will follow Kansas City Chiefs games, capitalising on the team’s popularity and the star power of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. NBC’s executive vice president of late-night programming, Katie Hockmeyer, said: “We’re hoping to pick up some of those eyeballs for our show.”
The other two lead-in games feature high-profile matchups: Green Bay Packers vs. Pittsburgh Steelers on 26 October, and Detroit Lions vs. Philadelphia Eagles on 16 November. Last year, a similar experiment gave The Tonight Show its best viewership of the season.
Sunday Night Football remains a ratings powerhouse, averaging over 20 million viewers per game and holding the title of TV’s top-rated programme for 14 consecutive years. This comes as linear television continues to decline in the streaming era, with late-night shows particularly affected.
Despite The Tonight Show’s long-term ratings slump—averaging just 1.188 million viewers in Q2 2025, behind Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Stephen Colbert—NBC has committed to Fallon and Seth Meyers through 2028. With Colbert’s show ending in May, Fallon may gain some of those viewers.
