This was the third week for WWE Monday Night Raw to compete against Monday Night Football on ESPN. Raw took place one day after No Mercy, which was a show featuring Brock Lesnar retaining his Universal Championship at by beating Braun Strowman clean in under ten minutes. The other big match at No Mercy saw Roman Reigns beat John Cena in the longest match of the night that got nearly 25 minutes. Of those four big names, only two of them were actually on Raw. How did that help or hurt the ratings?
The ratings are in for this week’s Raw and it followed a similar pattern to what Raw does against the NFL with an average audience of 2.923 million viewers for the three hours according to Showbuzz Daily.
That’s a good increase from the 2.833 million viewers from last week’s Raw and just a slight upgrade from the 2.903 million viewers from two weeks ago. When looking at the Raw numbers from last year in the first three weeks of the NFL season, Raw did about 2.6 million as an average, so there are more people watching this year.
There are some reasons for concern as it relates to the hourly breakdown of Raw. The first hour did 3.121 million viewers, hour two did 3.081 million viewers and the third hour had a massive drop with just 2.568 million viewers. That’s a pretty big drop from the first hour to the third hour.
If you’re wondering about competition on other networks, the Monday Night Football game won by the Dallas Cowboys over the Arizona Cardinals did an impressive number with 13.69 million viewers because the Cowboys are so popular. Meanwhile, WWE superstar Nikki Bella is a part of the Dancing with the Stars cast this season and that show did 8.67 million, which is considered a low number for that show.
Clearly, WWE is taking a close look at those numbers. That’s why they scheduled Reigns vs. Miz at halftime of the NFL game and put Enzo Amore’s Cruiserweight Championship celebration in the main event slot where they knew the audience would be smaller.
Next week’s Raw has already advertised two matches with four of the biggest names on the show as Seth Rollins will wrestle Braun Strowman and The Miz will defend the Intercontinental Championship against Roman Reigns, who beat Miz in a non-title match this week.
