The Week 7 showdown between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles pulled in a stunning 18.8 million viewers on ESPN, absolutely dwarfing World Series Game 3. It’s not even close. For years, the NFL tiptoed around baseball’s biggest stage, but now, regular-season football is flexing its muscles and leaving the Fall Classic in its dust.
Baseball’s Big Stage Just Got Dimmed
Fox finally dropped the viewership numbers for World Series Game 3, which featured Tampa Bay taking on Milwaukee, and it’s rough, folks. The game averaged a mere 8.33 million viewers, according to Manny Soloway of Awful Announcing. To put that in perspective, that makes it the fourth-least-watched World Series game *ever*. We’re talking behind Game 3 in 2023, Game 4 in 2023, and Game 3 in 2020. That’s not a blip, that’s a trend, and it’s a cold dose of reality for MLB. What was once untouchable is now getting smoked by a regular season NFL game.
The League Has Flipped The Script
Remember a time when the NFL would actually *hide* to avoid competing with the World Series? In the 1970s, Monday Night Football literally moved to Thursday to get out of its way. Before 2010, the league wouldn’t even play on Sunday nights to give the World Series its space. Those days are long gone. Now, it seems baseball needs to figure out how to schedule its biggest games when the NFL *isn’t* playing. That means Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Honestly, with the way the NFL is expanding its dominance, it feels inevitable that they’ll be playing on Tuesday and Wednesday nights soon enough too. It’s a new world, and the NFL is running it.
This article was created with AI assistance and published under Seattle On Tap’s editorial standards. See our Editorial Policy.
Originally reported by Pro Football Talk.
Leave a Reply