Neither game was particularly strong on its own, but the latest Monday Night Football doubleheader grossed a big audience on the ESPN networks.
ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes combined to average 19.8 million viewers for a pair of competing Monday Night Football games, with Packers-Giants averaging 11.41 million on ABC, Titans-Dolphins pulling 7.30 million on ESPN, and a Peyton and Eli “Manningcast” of both games adding 940,000 on ESPN2. Individually, the games rank among the four least-watched on MNF this season, no surprise given the cannibalization factor.
The combined audience peaked at 21.6 million.
Unlike the two previous MNF doubleheaders this season, which had staggered start times, both games Monday night began at 8:15 PM ET. The result was an additional hour of overlapping coverage. The two previous doubleheaders averaged a larger combined audience — 21.91 million in Week 3 and 21.76 million in Week 2 — but over a shorter two-hour overlap period.
There were few other Nielsen-rated live sportscasts on Monday. NBA TV averaged just 88,000 for a Mavericks-Grizzlies NBA regular season game, easily the least-watched NBA telecast this season. Viewership was barely half of the previous low, 170,000 for Knicks-Pelicans on NBA TV in October. No game on NBA TV last season had as small an audience.
The Clemson-Notre Dame NCAA men’s soccer national championship averaged 79,000 viewers on ESPNU, down a sharp 42% from Syracuse-Indiana last year (137K). Viewership was on par with the previous week’s Florida State-Stanford women’s title game, which aired in the same window on the same network and averaged 78,000.
Monday, December 11 sports viewership
