http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/culturebox/2015/10/sunday_night_football_is_the_best_show_on_television_seriously.html

On Sept. 10, an audience of 27.4 million tuned into the opening game of the 2015–16 NFL season to watch Rob Gronkowski, the rhinoceros who masquerades as a New England Patriots tight end, trample the defensive secondary of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The game was broadcast by NBC, in a special Thursday edition of Sunday Night Football, the network’s franchise sports broadcast, helmed by play-by-play man Al Michaels and analyst Cris Collinsworth. You could call Sunday Night Football the Gronkowski, the stampeding rhino, of televised sports. For the past four years, it has been the No. 1 program on prime-time TV. It’s ranked first among adults ages 18–49 for five consecutive fall seasons. The show’s dominance is such that its Nielsen numbers appear to have an inverse relationship to the quality of the games it broadcasts. The Fall 2014 season featured the most lopsided games in Sunday Night Football’s nine-year history, with an average margin of victory of more than 18 points. The show still drew an average of 21.3 million viewers; nine of the top 10 individual broadcasts for Fall 2014 were Sunday Night Football games. (The one exception was Fox’s coverage of the seventh game of the 2014 World Series.) Even SNF’s pregame show is a juggernaut. Last year, Football Night in America placed fifth overall among the 18–49 demographic, earning better ratings than all but two nonsports shows, Empire and The Big Bang Theory.