Sunday morning football doesn’t have the same numbers as Sunday afternoon or evening football (or Monday night or Thursday), but it’s better than anything else on TV at that time of day.
Week 7 matchup between the Steelers and the Saints averaged 7.7 million viewersfor ESPN.
The fourth consecutive Sunday morning game drew the third-highest audience for any international game on NFL Network.
The four European games played in October (three in London, one in France) averaged 7.1 million viewers on NFLN.
The only problem with early morning football (which will proliferate if/when the NFL secures the ability to host 16 international games a year) is that it makes Sunday morning pregame shows irrelevant. As more and more games are played at 9:30 a.m. ET, networks may reconsider whether they want to have pregame shows.
That said, networks televising Sunday afternoon games need a studio presence for updates and halftime segments. But the noon ET to 1:00 PM ET pregame shows will see increasingly smaller audiences as more and more games are played on Sunday mornings.