The NFL has seen ratings soar this year with pretty much every network celebrating new multi-year highs. But that wasn’t the case for Monday Night Football this week, as much as ESPN would want you to believe otherwise.
NFL ratings have gone through the roof thanks to the continued popularity of the league and the new Nielsen Big Data measurement system. But that growth was put to the test on Monday with the matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals thanks to millions of subscribers missing out on the game during ESPN’s carriage dispute with YouTube TV.
Even the draw of America’s Team wasn’t enough to get the two sides to hammer out a deal. So when the numbers came out, it was going to be a significant bellwether for the impact of the YouTube TV blackout on ESPN’s audience.
And when ESPN released viewership numbers of 16.2 million viewers, all certainly seemed well. The network noted it was the second-highest Week 9 audience since 2011. Great, right?
Well, what was missing from the PR blast was that last year’s Week 9 audience drew 20.6 million viewers for a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That means that Monday Night Football actually saw a 21% year-over-year decline to the corresponding week last year.
That saw the ESPN PR tweet get community noted with the additional context from Mike Florio at Pro Football Talk.
Screengrab via X
It’s ironic that this situation would arise almost immediately after ESPN president of content Burke Magnus attempted to downplay the effect of the YouTube TV dispute on college football primetime ratings on Saturday night. ABC saw ratings drop for Saturday’s Tennesse-Oklahoma matchup, but Magnus attributed it to going against Game 7 of the World Series instead of any issues with not being on YouTube TV. He sent a tweet calling out Front Office Sports for trying to craft a narrative that the impasse was harming ESPN viewership.
Magnus may have a case when it comes to Saturday, but this Monday Night Football ratings drop is much harder for ESPN to spin. There was no World Series Game 7 competition to go up against. Similarly, there is no bigger ratings draw in the NFL than the Dallas Cowboys, although Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs might come close. Maybe the nation wasn’t captivated to see Jacoby Brissett lead the Cardinals to victory, but it’s hard to pinpoint something that might match the impact of not being on YouTube TV and having 10 million people not have the ability to watch.