This 60 Minutes segment on the genius of Rams coach Sean McVay is aired three days after his team got smoked in their season opener. Oops.
Courtesy of CBS News
I don’t think Paramount CEO David Ellison and Bari Weiss, whom Ellison hired as editor-in-chief of CBS News, are going to be good for the news division. I think the overhaul of 60 Minutes, which saw the firing of several correspondents and producers and their replacement with a new executive producer and some new contributors, was foolish and craven, and it will probably turn out badly in the long term.
But I also don’t think that the sizable decline in audience for the 60 Minutes season premiere Sunday, compared to last season’s opener, was entirely or even mostly Ellison and Weiss’ fault.
60 Minutes drew 7.94 million viewers Sunday, down by 21 percent from last season’s debut (10.03 million on Sept. 28, 2025). That’s not good! It’s also lower than every 60 Minutes that had a national NFL lead-in last season — also not good!
Here’s the however: The NFL game(s) that led into 60 Minutes was down by almost the same amount (22 percent) from the one that led into 60’s premiere last year. That’s probably not just a coincidence.
CBS averaged 18.6 million viewers for its late afternoon game Sunday. Last season, the late afternoon, national window (4:25 p.m. ET) games on CBS averaged about 26 million viewers.
So why the big drop for this NFL season opener? It’s largely because the league scheduled doubleheaders on both CBS and Fox Sunday, the first time that’s happened in week 1 since 2023. Normally one or the other gets the late afternoon showcase and the outsized audience that comes with it. (There might be a late game on the other, but it’s usually just a regional telecast.)
On Sunday, the combined NFL audience for the 4:25 ET games was almost 39 million, but 20.35 million of those viewers went to Fox. It’s doubtful that CBS would have had all of those viewers if it had carried the only 4:25 game, but it probably would have been a lot closer to last year’s 26 million average and thus fed several million more viewers into 60 Minutes.
I hate when people try to use ratings (or any data) as a cudgel without knowing what the numbers mean or the context in which they exist. A primary reason I started this newsletter is to work against that sort of thing. One off night for a post-NFL 60 Minutes is probably an anomaly. If in a couple months there are five or six like that, then we’ll have something more to discuss. Until then, though, down NFL = down 60 Minutes probably explains most of what we need to know.
The top network and cable shows for last week are below, followed by a check-in on the non-sports and non-news parts of cable.