The Alliance of American Football got off to a decent start in the metered markets.
The debut of the AAF delivered a 2.1 overnight rating on CBS Saturday night, the highest for a non-NFL pro football game since a 2004 Arena Football League telecast on NBC (2.5). CBS aired regional coverage of San Diego-San Antonio and Atlanta-Orlando.
The AAF earned the same overnight rating as ABC’s competing Thunder-Rockets NBA regular season game. It came to within two tenths of the Duke-Virginia men’s college basketball game on ESPN earlier in the night (2.3).
As one would expect, the 2.1 pales in comparison to even the weakest NFL telecasts. CBS drew overnights of 3.0 and 2.6 for its two NFL preseason games last year, Lions-Buccaneers and Saints-Chargers, respectively. The NFL Honors, which aired in the same Saturday night window on CBS the previous weekend, had a 2.7.
The last time a new football league debuted on primetime broadcast television, the XFL launched with a whopping 10.3 overnight on NBC in 2001. That league arrived with significantly more fanfare. XFL ratings famously tanked throughout the rest of the season, and the league folded.
[Numbers from John Ourand/Twitter 2.10, ESPN]
