Haynes King’s Walk-Off Gave the Hall of Fame Game Its Best Number in Years — Just Not the One Everyone’s Citing
Seven million people watched a preseason game between two teams that finished under .500 last year. That’s the headline everyone’s running with, and it’s not wrong. It’s just not the most interesting number in the room.
The Panthers beat the Cardinals 33-30 in Canton last Thursday when undrafted rookie Haynes King scored a walk-off touchdown as time expired, capping a 13-play drive that started with Carolina trailing by three. NBC Sports announced Monday that the broadcast averaged 6.99 million viewers across NBC and Peacock. Round it up and you get the number every outlet is leading with: 7 million.
The “highest since 2017” claim doesn’t quite hold up
Multiple outlets, including a Yahoo Sports recap that credited Palm Beach Post reporter Joe Schad, framed this as the best Hall of Fame Game audience since 2017. That’s the story NBC itself is selling — “Big Numbers for Down-to-the-Wire Pro Football Hall of Fame Game,” the network’s PR account posted Monday, and Schad amplified it by noting the game also topped every NHL broadcast from last season and MLB’s biggest audience this year.
Here’s the problem: it’s only true if you’re talking about NBC’s own Hall of Fame Game broadcasts specifically. Sports Media Watch reported that this year’s number ranks as the most-watched edition of the game in five years — since Steelers-Cowboys drew 7.33 million on Fox in 2021. Barrett Media’s breakdown confirms it: since the game moved to Thursday nights, only two broadcasts have cracked 7 million, and both involved the Cowboys. This year’s 6.99 million doesn’t actually clear that bar. It’s the best number on NBC specifically since Cowboys-Cardinals pulled 8.2 to 8.3 million in 2017 — a real distinction, but a narrower one than the framing suggests, and it still trails the 2021 broadcast outright.
That’s a nitpick with a point behind it. The Hall of Fame Game audience has been softening for a decade — an 11 million-viewer Sunday night broadcast in 2015 is now a distant memory, per Barrett Media’s numbers — and this year’s bump is real but modest, not a blowout comeback. Calling it the best since 2017 makes for a cleaner tweet than calling it the best in five years with an asterisk, but the asterisk is the actual story.
What still makes the comparison to other leagues fair
None of that undercuts the broader point Schad and others are making about NFL dominance over other leagues, and this part checks out. Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner noted that MLB’s largest regular-season audience in 2025 was a Red Sox-Yankees broadcast on Fox that drew 3.05 million — well under half of what a meaningless NFL exhibition pulled in. The NHL’s regular-season average sits in the mid-500,000s across its network partners. Even the Stanley Cup Final, the NHL’s showcase event, topped out around 5.2 to 5.9 million viewers for its biggest games on ESPN/ABC this June — still short of a game featuring backups from Carolina and Arizona.
That gap says less about this particular Hall of Fame Game and more about what live NFL programming does across the board, preseason included. A three-win Cardinals team and a rebuilding Panthers roster still out-drew a league championship. That’s not new — it’s been true for years — but it’s worth separating from the “best since 2017” framing, because one claim is about how good this specific broadcast was, and the other is about how far ahead the NFL sits regardless.
The game itself earned the audience it kept
Whatever the exact ranking, King gave NBC an ending worth having. Third string when the night started, he came off the bench and outplayed a Panthers offense that had looked pedestrian with veteran Kenny Pickett under center, finishing 21 of 34 for 180 yards and two touchdowns before tucking the ball on third-and-14 and running it in himself as the clock hit zero. Teammate David Moore told reporters afterward,
“When they called it, and he didn’t look (at the receiver), I knew he was going to run.” — via the Panthers’ team site.
An undrafted quarterback delivering a walk-off in his first appearance is exactly the kind of finish that keeps a broadcast’s back-half audience from bailing, and it’s a reasonable part of why this number held up better than a typical August exhibition. Ratings don’t build themselves around a scoreless fourth quarter.
The real takeaway isn’t that the NFL beat MLB and the NHL again — everyone already knew that was coming. It’s that even a genuinely strong number for this event still needed the caveat stripped out before you could call it the best in almost a decade, and that’s the detail getting lost in the retweets.
