The XFL, predictably, lost viewers from Week 1 to Week 2, with a 35.5 percent drop on Saturday’s game on ABC and the Sunday game on FS1 at just under 1.4 million being the eye-openers.
Three of the four Week 1 games were over 3.3 million viewers, with the fourth game, the ESPN Sunday game, at 2.50 million.
The two ABC games from Week 2 drew 2.15 million (Saturday’s New York-D.C. game) and 2.40 million on Sunday (Dallas-L.A.).
The XFL game on Fox on Saturday (Tampa Bay-Seattle) drew 2.32 million.
The game on FS1 on Sunday (St. Louis-Houston) was at 1.36 million.
That last one, particularly, yikes.
The across-the-board drop-off was expected, and there’s actually good news, because, by and large, it wasn’t as bad as what the AAF experienced this time last year.
The first and only partial season of the AAF spring league opened with a prime-time game on CBS that drew 3.3 million viewers, and then its Week 2 prime-time game, on TNT, was down to just over a million.
OK, that said, part of the AAF drop-off was going from CBS to TNT, from broadcast to cable.
The comparable this weekend is Fox Sunday Week 1 to FS1 Sunday Week 2 – where you saw the numbers go from 3.4 million to 1.4 million, a 59 percent jump off the cliff.
Final averages across the board
Week 1: 3.12 million viewers
Week 2: 2.05 million viewers
Decrease from Week 1 to Week 2: 34.3 percent
Story by Chris Graham