The NFL remains the unquestioned king of the Nielsen ratings, but this season’s opener appears to have fallen a bit short with audiences.Despite the anticipation surrounding the Super Bowl rematch, Wednesday’s Patriots-Seahawks game in Seattle averaged 25.1 million viewers. And while that figure would be celebrated by any other sports league or entertainment property, it actually marked a 12-percent downtick from last year’s Cowboys-Eagles opener. In fact, as reported by Awful Announcing, it was the league’s lowest regular-season opener since 2022.The data is a bit of a mixed bag.While the overall audience decreased, viewership spiked among viewers between 18 and 49 as that demographic came in at a five-year high for the season opener.The best news for the NFL is that it eclipsed 25 million viewers with its first game for the fourth straight season, further cementing the league as the most powerful property in American entertainment.But the ratings news does come at the onset of a new era with Nielsen, which changed its methodology this year, much to the NFL’s dismay. Seahawks nose tackle Byron Murphy II, left, pressures Patriots quarterback Drake Maye Seattle Seahawks safety Julian Love (20) makes an interception against New England PatriotsBeginning two weeks ago, Nielsen has been using a hybrid audience-measurement methodology that relies on datasets from electronic devices as well as traditional human-monitored household panels.NFL head of data and analytics Paul Ballew told reporters during a conference call last month that the league was still trying to understand how it would impact ratings.’We don’t have enough impact data to fully assess,’ Ballew said. ‘We’re still trying to make sense of it. We’re still trying to make sense of some of the logic behind some of the methodological changes.’From our initial impact, it looks like a negative for sports,’ Ballew continued. ‘On the other side, co-viewing or partial co-viewing implementation is a positive. So we’re going to have to continue to spend some time pulling this apart and making sense of it.’The most accurate measurement, Ballew said, is the league’s top priority with Nielsen ratings, which are the benchmark for the industry.’Media measurement matters a lot to us,’ he said. ‘It’s adding into the amount of homework we have to take on going into the season to make sense. We do think it’s a misstep on Nielsen’s part to go do this the way they’re doing it. It continues to accelerate our pressure point to continue to pursue ongoing measurement improvement because it’s so critically important to us and everybody else in this space.’