A month and a half ago, WWE Raw popped its biggest rating of the NFL season (Monday Night Football having long been Vince McMahon’s true arch enemy) when Goldberg returned to television. That rating was a big win for WWE, which had hit an all-time ratings low going up against the first Presidential debate in September. The return of the Undertaker didn’t quite manage to get Smackdown to top that number, but Monday night’s episode of Raw came extremely close, with the main event of Charlotte Flair vs. Sasha Banks for the Raw Women’s Championship retaining a good chunk of viewers as the show managed its second-biggest rating since the NFL has returned this year.
The numbers, via ShowBuzz Daily, have the three hours of Raw clocking in at 3.11 million viewers, which was just BARELY trumped by the 3.13 million that Goldberg’s return pulled in. Most promising was the fact that the audience never dipped below three million viewers for any of the three hours of the show.
This bodes extremely well for the women’s division and the idea of giving both newer faces and better wrestling more time on Raw going forward. It also in small part might speak to the truly abysmal 2016 NFL season. But we’re more than happy giving Sasha and Charlotte the credit, because that was one hell of a match and a very enjoyable Raw.
