ESPN posted a strong number for its Monday-night NFL wild-card game between the Texans and Steelers. Whether that’s the last playoff game the Disney-owned outlet airs in that slot, however, remains to be seen.
The network said Wednesday it averaged 29.1 million viewers for the Houston-Pittsburgh game, a 30–6 blowout win for the Texans. The audience figure, including other Disney properties such as ABC, is up 15% from a Vikings-Rams game last year that averaged 25.4 million viewers in that time slot—though there are some difficult factors on both sides of the comparison.
Neither Monday-night wild-card game was competitive, with the Rams and Texans each racing out to big second-half leads. The Minnesota–Los Angeles game was also shifted to Arizona due to last year’s Southern California wildfires. The Texans-Steelers game peaked at an average of 33 million viewers just before halftime, suggesting an even higher number would have been possible with a closer score.
The latest NFL viewership figure is also an emphatic coda to what otherwise was a weekend of historic viewership for the prior five wild-card games. Each of the other four involved networks recorded a series of milestones for their broadcasts, most notably Amazon, which set a new league streaming record for its exclusive coverage of the Packers-Bears game on Saturday night, averaging 31.6 million viewers.
The Texans-Steelers game, tied for the second-best wild-card viewership in ESPN history, was also the final game in Pittsburgh for longtime coach Mike Tomlin, who left the franchise Tuesday after 19 seasons—none of them with a losing record.
Contract Matters
That Houston-Pittsburgh contest could also be the final Monday-night wild-card broadcast on ESPN. As the league prepares to reopen most of its domestic media agreements this year, a separate, five-year term between ESPN and the NFL for those Monday-night wild-card games has now expired. Disney, which owns ESPN, is interested in extending it, as the slot fits right into its existing Monday Night Football rights—a package that enjoyed a banner regular season.
ESPN posted its second-best season in 20 years airing MNF, and it averaged 16.5 million viewers when including all of its 23 NFL games, up 10% from last year.
There will be competition, though, for the rights to that Monday-night wild-card slot.
The NFL playoffs resume on Saturday and Sunday with the divisional playoff round, with the remaining teams going in with varying levels of rest after the wild-card games.
