How much will YouTube TV outage impact Monday Night Football ratings?

Usually, ESPN announces the Monday Night Football ratings on Wednesday. This week, with YouTube TV customers prevented from watching Cardinals-Cowboys, ESPN may “forget” to post the numbers.

The outage blacked out the Week 9 prime-time game for millions. And it will be interesting to see what the audience ultimately was.

For now, Bryan Fischer of SI.com has some data regarding the impact of the dispute on ESPN/ABC college football programming.

College GameDay, per Fischer, fell from 2.5 million viewers the prior Saturday to 2 million. That’s a 20-percent drop.

As to the three ABC Saturday afternoon windows for games, the prior weekend had 6.6 million, 7.8 million, and 6.8 million viewers. A week later, those same windows averaged 4.5 million, 7.8 million, and 4.8 million.

The Cardinals-Cowboys game will be compared both to the prior weeks of 2025 MNF games and to last year’s Week 9 contest (Buccaneers at Chiefs). Both Week 9 games had a national brand in play (Chiefs, Cowboys), so it’s somewhat apples to apples.

Of course, this year’s game will benefit from the new Nielsen Big Data + Panel formula, which is the rising tide that has lifted all broadcast boats.

Whatever the number is, we’ll find out eventually and inevitably. And if ESPN can find a way to make the number look good, the information be released at the usual time, in the usual way.

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