Week four XFL ratings: Some growth on cable, network still dropping

Here’s a look at this week’s ratings for Vince McMahon’s XFL revival:

Saturday —

As it has every week, the early game aired on ABC. The overall audience dropped 24 percent to 1.558 million viewers and it did a 0.4 rating in the 18-49 demo, down 20 percent. The 18-34 number is unavailable at this time.

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The later game on Fox held up better with an average audience of 1.802 million viewers, down just six percent from last week’s Fox broadcast. This week’s game was down 17 percent in 18-49 to a 0.5 and 40 percent in 18-34 to a 0.3.

As compared to other sports programming for the day, both games beat everything except a primetime NBA on ABC game that averaged 2.347 million viewers. In the demos, the Fox game beat everything except the NBA and Saturday Night Live on NBC.

Sunday —

Game one, which aired in the same time slot as the late game the previous three weeks, was on FS1 and averaged 1.113 million viewers, up 11 percent from the game on FS1 the previous week. This week’s game did a 0.38 rating in 18-49, up three percent. In 18-34, it was down 18 percent, averaging a 0.23 rating.

The second game aired in primetime on ESPN2, a first for this incarnation of the league. It averaged 1.03 million viewers and a 0.34 rating in 18-49 and a 0.2 in 18-34.

This was the first time that ESPN2 had aired an XFL game. The best comparison would also be last week’s FS1 game as the two stations have a similar subscriber base and average audience number.

It’s rare that anything on ESPN2 does over a million viewers, so that was a great number. As a comparison, the past weekend’s college basketball games on ESPN2 fell between 322,000 and 791,000 viewers.

Below are the ratings and average viewership totals for all four weeks of the XFL so far: