Monday night’s Buccaneers-Lions game drew a huge audience on ESPN.
The late game between the Texans and Seahawks? Not so much.
In fact, ESPN’s press release trumpeting Monday night’s ratings don’t even say how many people watched Texans-Seahawks.
The ESPN press release says that Buccaneers-Lions generated an audience of 18.8 million viewers. That’s the most-watched Week Seven Monday night game for ESPN ever, and a 19 percent increase over last year’s Week Seven Monday night game.
But the ESPN press release doesn’t even say how many people watched Texans-Seahawks, which is something that only happens when the number is nothing to speak of. ESPN announced only that accounting for both games, Monday Night Football averaged 12.7 million viewers for the doubleheader.
Math tells us that if Bucs-Lions got 18.8 million viewers, and the average of Bucs-Lions and Texans-Seahawks was 12.7 million viewers, that means the audience for Texans-Seahawks was 6.6 million viewers.
An audience of 6.6 million viewers is solid for most things on American television, but not for an NFL game. The viewers voted with their eyeballs and declared that a game starting at 10 p.m. ET wasn’t something they wanted to stay up for.
Monday night’s lineup was the last doubleheader of the season; the rest of the year, every Monday will have only one game. Given the audience for the second game, the NFL and ESPN may reconsider whether they want to have Monday night doubleheaders with such late kickoffs going forward.
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