If you wanted good news for the NFL from its Monday Night Football ratings, you got it. If you wanted bad news for the NFL from its Monday Night Football ratings, you also got it.
How the media and pundits interpret the information will depend on their agenda. However, if your agenda is truth, here are the facts.
Monday night’s contest between the Packers and Lions scored a 7.6 rating in metered markets. That number represents a 6 percent increase from the disastrous Chiefs-Broncos match-up of last week. The game also registered a 25% increase from MNF’s season low rating between the Colts and the Titans in mid-October.
That concludes the “good news” portion of our program.
The bad news comes into focus when comparing last night’s numbers to last year’s numbers at this exact time. In Week 9 of 2016, the Seahawks bested the Buffalo Bills by a score of 31-25. That game, played on November 7th, came on the eve of President Trump’s election to the White House and became the lowest-rated Week 9 MNF game ever.
During Week 9 of 2017, the Packers and Lions actually fell 3 percent from that already low mark set by the Seahawks and Bills.
Sports TV Ratings puts it into perspective:
So, despite the fact that the game got a higher rating from the previous week, and was up considerably from the MNF season low, it still registered as one of the worst performances for a Week 9 MNF game, ever.
Pundits will attempt to spin this in any number of ways, however, one thing remains clear from these numbers: The NFL, according to industry analysts, almost set a new all-time low for MNF ratings in Week 9.
Hard to turn that into a positive.