Ratings: Jason Kelce's They Call It Midnight Edges Higher in Final Episode

First on LateNighter: Jason Kelce closed out his five-week ESPN late-night trial run on a relative high note. (Emphasis on the relative.)

With 278,000 viewers tuning in Friday January 31st, 2025, They Call It Late Night With Jason Kelce drew more than twice the audience compared its all-time low last week—despite the fact that this week’s episode began at at 1:30am ET, a full half hour later than the show’s already late-late slot.

Ratings were also up among younger viewers, with 86,000 viewers aged 18-49 tuning in, an increase of 69% vs last week.

But as impressive as those gains may sound, they have more to do with how few people tuned in last week than anything else. In fact, this week’s episode still ranks as the show’s second-lowest rated episode, down -68% vs its all-time high among total viewers, and down -77% among viewers in the key 18-49 demo.

Kelce’s guests Friday were Jerome Bettis, Ron Jaworski and Lane Johnson. Kelce’s Super Bowl-bound brother Travis also Zoomed in for a short check-in.

So what are we to make of this week’s less-than-stellar ratings and their bearing on the show’s prospects for a renewal? Arguably not much.

As we’ve previously reported, Kelce’s ratings swings—both good and bad—would seem to have less to do with his show and more with the number of viewers already tuned into ESPN any given Friday night.

For example, last week’s low-rated episode imediately followed ESPN’s X Games coverage, which drew an average audience of 244,000 total viewers. Meanwhile, on January 10th (the night of Kelce’s highest rated episode), more than 20 million viewers watched the Goodyear Cotton Bowl earlier in the evening, with 1.6 million sticking around for his direct lead-in, an episode of SportsCenter.

Also worth considering: airing as it does in the wee hours of Friday night, the show was always intended to be viewed at multiple times and on multiple platforms, including ESPN+, Kelce’s YouTube channel, and a Saturday morning re-airing on ESPN2. In other words, Kelce’s first-run broadcast numbers aren’t necessarily the be-all end-all for ESPN.

In a New York Times profile last month, ESPN’s president of content Burke Magnus sounded optimistic about the show’s future. “For me, it’s going to be a little bit more art than science,” Magnus told The Times. “Do people think it’s good and funny? Does it have the potential to grow?”

Complete Nielsen ratings charts for They Call It Late Night With Jason Kelce‘s five-week run on ESPN follow below: