The first ever Monday Night Football flex worked out perfectly for ESPN/ABC.
The latest edition of NFL Monday Night Football (Eagles-Seahawks) averaged a combined 10.5 rating and 19.36 million viewers across ABC (10.27M), ESPN (7.95M) and the Peyton and Eli Manning alternate presentation on ESPN2 (1.15M) — 19.40 million including ESPN Deportes (42K) — ranking as easily the most-watched Week 15 edition of MNF since Packers-Vikings in 1999 (22.49M).
The Seahawks’ upset win, which peaked with 20.3 million viewers, increased 18% and viewership 21% from Rams-Packers last year (8.9, 16.03M). For the season, it ranks fourth among Monday night games behind Eagles-Chiefs in Week 11 (29.03M), Bills-Jets in Week 1 (22.67M) and Cowboys-Chargers in Week 6 (19.64M).
MNF was originally set to feature the Chiefs against the moribund Patriots before the NFL engineered the first flex scheduling change in series history. MNF is now averaging 16 million viewers this season, up 23% from last year, and up 36% excluding this year’s two additional split doubleheaders.
Additional details on the game, and Week 15 as a whole, are available here.
Shifting to the college game, the Western Kentucky-Old Dominion Bahamas Bowl (from Charlotte) averaged 684,000 viewers across ESPN and ESPN2, down 17% from UAB-Miami (Ohio) last year (822K). The ESPN portion of the game averaged 668,000 and the concluding 14 minutes on ESPN2 drew 918,000.
In other action, Oakland-Michigan State topped the basketball charts with 210,000 on BTN, followed by a Mavericks-Nuggets NBA game on NBA TV at 179,000. In women’s action, UCLA-Ohio State scored 117,000 on FS1.
Monday, December 18 sports ratings
Original chart (including WWE Raw) below:
