The NFL said today that Sunday’s AFC and NFC Championship Games drew a huge TV audience, giving the league its most-viewed Championship Sunday in 28 years.
The league also said that the Saints’ win over the Vikings was the most-viewed non-Super Bowl telecast on American Television since the Seinfeld finale in 1998.
With an average viewership of 52.9 million fans on Sunday, the league got its best conference championship numbers since January of 1982, when the Bengals beat the Chargers in a game that has come to be known as the Freezer Bowl, and the 49ers beat the Cowboys when Joe Montana hit Dwight Clark for “The Catch.”
The combined audience for Jets-Colts and Vikings-Saints represented a 34 percent increase over last season’s Championship Sunday.