Super Bowl Ratings Fall to Lowest Level Since 1969

Sunday’s Super Bowl blowout of the Kansas City Chiefs by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers has earned the title of the “least-watched Super Bowl in recent history,” according to Deadline.

The game emerged with a Nielsen-estimated 38.2 rating — a measure of how many households watched the game out of all possible households, according to Sports Media Watch.

The rating was the lowest since Super Bowl III in 1969, which had a 36.0 rating. That was the year Joe Namath and his upstart New York Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts.

Sunday’s matchup was only the seventh Super Bowl with a rating below 40, and the first sub-40 rating since 1990.

On CBS, 91.6 million people watched the game, an eight percent drop from last year’s game on Fox alone with 99.9 million viewers, according to Deadline.

Across all platforms, this year’s game averaged 96.4 million viewers, making it the lowest audience for a Super Bowl since 2007, when the game attracted 93.18 million viewers.

Some noted that neither Tampa nor Kansas City are major TV markets, although one major metro area did follow the game closely — Boston.

There was one increase. The streaming audience of 5.7 million was a 68 percent increase from the 3.4 million fans who watched the game online last year.