The return of the NFL's Monday Night Football broadcast was always going to cost WWE Monday Night Raw some viewers, but the numbers from September 12 were ugly. The company's flagship show has been on a hot streak since Vince McMahon retired at the end of July. Intrigue was piqued as fans wondered what the product would look like without McMahon in charge of creative and having the final say on everything that happened every week. Triple H generated a ton of goodwill with wrestling fans when he had the book in NXT, so a jump in ratings initially made sense.
However, Raw continued to rack up viewers, consistently pushing or surpassing two million viewers while hanging onto them as the second hour bled into the third. That's historically been challenging for WWE, but some subtle Triple H changes to show structure have paid off massively for the red brand. The NFL is the most popular sports league in the United States, and football absorbs attention away from everything on television. Not just WWE and Monday Night Raw.
The numbers are in for the September 12 episode of Raw, and the show took a significant hit in the face of the NFL's competition. According to Wrestlenomics on Patreon, the broadcast was watched by "1,710,000 viewers on average" and was down 17 percent compared to last week's episode. In the coveted 18-49 demographic, Raw was down 24 percent. Despite these lower numbers, Fightful Select is reporting that they had "heard from several within WWE that expected the WWE Raw number to be lower than the 1.7 million that they landed this week."
NFL Will Be A Tough Opponent Monday Night Raw
As Dave Meltzer recently discussed, the NFL usually isn't a massive problem for WWE when they're hot. And with that context in mind, a dip of this magnitude isn't the end of the world for the company as it enters its slow season. It's not like the September 12 episode of Raw featured the return of a top star or was the go-home show before a massive pay-per-view. Clash At The Castle is firmly in the rearview, and Extreme Rules is several weeks away.
If 1.7 or 1.8 million is Raw's new standard in the face of competition from Monday Night Football, that has to be seen as a win as WWE settles into the Triple H era. The stories being told are compelling, and there's no reason to believe that Extreme Rules or bigger Raw shows won't be able to steal some eyeballs back from the NFL. WWE also wisely moved its premium live events away from Sunday nights, reducing its exposure to competition from football. That's a move AEW appears to have mimicked for Full Gear in November, but there's also nothing stopping Triple H from running an NXT show that same weekend, much like he did ahead of All Out.
Sources: Wrestlenomics/Patreon, Fightful Select/Patreon