The word “struggling,” doesn’t seem to be strong enough to describe what has happened to the ratings for NBC’s Sunday Night Football and ESPN’s Monday Night Football.
Sunday Night Football’s Patriots-Ravens game last weekend was down a whopping 31 percent over last year’s Week 10 game become the season’s least-watched Sunday game, according to Sports Media Watch.
“Ratings have dropped for all 11 NFL games on NBC this season, with viewership down for all-but-one,” SMW reported.
Meanwhile, ESPN’s Monday Night Football averaged 11.45 million viewers and was the series’ second-best Week 10 audience since 2015, it was still down 28 percent over last season.
On the other hand, Fox earned 18.24 million viewers Sunday with its Buccaneers-Panthers game becoming the most-watched game since 2016 when a Week 16 game earned 18.40 million viewers on Fox on Christmas Eve.
However, the Seahawks-Rams and Bengals-Steelers games on Fox lost twenty percent and 13 percent respectively.
As to CBS, its Bills-Cardinals game was off 35 percent.
Even as football continues to bring more viewers than other TV fares, the numbers are still not improving as much as the NFL had hoped in this post-election time and most games are still falling over last year’s numbers.
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