Tom Brady's Return to New England Is Ratings Gold for NBC's 'Sunday Night Football'

LOS ANGELES – Tom Brady’s big performance between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and his former club, the New England Patriots Sunday night also brought big ratings for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” the largest in nine years for the program.

The viewer numbers in the match-up at the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium were 6.0 in the topline, ages 18-49 demographic and garnered about 28.5 million viewers in the Live+Same Day numbers from Nielsen.

The game, which was won by Brady’s Buccaneers 19-17, was the largest NBC “Sunday Night Football” audience since Week 17 of the 2012 season when Dallas-Washington played for the NFC East title for an estimated 30.3 million viewers. It was also the second most-watched NBC “Sunday Night Football” game since the show debuted in 2006 for a 34 share or percentage of televisions in use that were tuned to the game – the highest for any game in its history.