Tom Brady set a record for the winningest quarterback in Super Bowl history, but the New England Patriots’ amazing comeback and overtime victory against the Atlanta Falcons wasn’t enough to set record ratings.
The game drew an average TV audience of 111.32 million on Fox, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen, making it the fifth most-watched, just behind Super Bowl XLVI in 2012 when the Giants beat the Patriots.
The most-watched Super Bowl remains the Patriots’ win over the Seattle Seahawks in 2015, which averaged 114.4 million viewers and also went down to the wire.
This year’s game also fell slightly short of last year’s contest between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers, which drew 111.9 million viewers.
Beyond the flagship Fox network, the game drew an additional 650,000 viewers on the Spanish-language service Fox Deportes, while 1.72 million watched it online via Fox Sports Go.
Though it didn’t set ratings records, the game is still a big win for Fox and the advertisers who paid about $5 million for 30 seconds of commercial time. Fox was able to reap additional advertising dollars when the game went into overtime.
If the Falcons had continued pummeling the Patriots in the second half after entering halftime up 21-3, the audience likely would have fallen dramatically.
The Patriots comeback also likely will bode well for the premiere of Fox’s “24: Legacy,” a counterterrorism drama that aired following the game.
Fox is a unit of 21st Century Fox, which shares common ownership with Wall Street Journal parent News Corp.
Write to Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com
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