Raw ratings down slightly against big NFL number

Raw on Monday did 2.85 million viewers, down three percent from last week, which has to be considered a good number since the Dallas Cowboys win over the Detroit Lions did the best Monday Night Football number of the season with 18.61 million viewers.

The key was that they did a decent job of maintaining the audience over the three hours. The show did decline each hour, which has been the pattern since the end of daylight savings time, but the drops weren’t too severe.

Raw was fifth for the night on cable, beating all news programming, but losing to football related programming. It was probably helped by most of television airing reruns. Ratings should start increasing as Raw enters the new year with Monday Night Football over for the season.

The three hours were:

8 p.m. 2.97 million viewers
9 p.m. 2.88 million viewers
10 p.m. 2.72 million viewers

Here’s a chart from Paul Fontaine that analyzes the last 20 weeks of Raw ratings compared to numbers from 2015: