NFL games gather a live audience like nothing else. But not everything carrying The Shield on the show thrives in today’s world of ever-fracturing audiences.

For instance, Thursday night’s NFL Honors on Fox and NFL Network generated the smallest audience in the history of the annual awards show, which first was televised in prime time in 2012.

Via Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, 2.3 million tuned in on average. That’s a 20-percent drop from last year. It’s also 11 percent lower than the previous low-water mark set in February 2021.

The CBS and NBC evening programming outperformed the show. ABC did not. Also falling short was a TNT/truTV broadcast of Mavericks-Celtics, which had 1.81 million viewers.

The biggest audience for NFL Honors happened in 2015 on NBC, with 4.669 million average viewers. That’s more than twice the amount of the 2025 viewership.