The NFL Super Wild Card Weekend concluded on a Monday night (January 17, 8:15 p.m. ET) for the first time, as ESPN’s MegaCast presentation (ESPN, ABC, ESPN2, and ESPN Deportes) registered 23,150,000 viewers for the Los Angeles Rams 23-point victory over the Arizona Cardinals.
The audience peaked at 27.9 million viewers as the Rams led 21-0 in the second quarter (9:30 – 9:45 p.m.).
Despite the first half lead, which ballooned to 28-0 shortly after halftime, and the margin of victory, the debut of the Monday night Wild Card easily became the most-watched Monday night NFL game during ESPN’s Monday Night Football era (2006 – present).
The Wild Card game concludes a season where Monday Night Football finished the regular season with its best viewership since 2010, including up 16% from 2020 and 13% from 2019.
Note: MegaCast included main telecast, Peyton and Eli’ and ‘Between the Lines’ all on ESPN+ – those audiences are not included in this release; viewership reported by Nielsen for ESPN includes streaming audience across some ESPN, NFL and Yahoo Sports properties
As part of ESPN’s MegaCast, NFL Super Wild Card with Peyton and Eli continued to add their show to ESPN’s most-watched alternate telecasts, as the duos’ nine most recent shows are now ESPN’s nine most-watched alternate telecasts.
The audience on ESPN2 for the Wild Card game registered 1,419,000 million viewers.
The complete list of the Manning audiences is available here.
The debut Monday night Wild Card brings ESPN’s season of superlatives to a grand conclusion.
During the 2021-22 season, inclusive of the Cardinals-Rams audience, ESPN delivered two of the four most-watched NFL Monday night games and three of the six during this era of MNF (2006 – present).
More on the tremendous regular season, including MNF televising its most-watched game since 2009, can be found here.
Additional Cardinals-Rams highlight
- ESPN and ABC combined to win the night among all key demos, including Males 18-49 (ESPN), Persons 18-34 (ESPN) and households (ABC).
- Cardinals-Rams was the most-watched telecast among all key demos, including Males 18-34 (ESPN), Males 25-54 (ESPN) and Persons 25-54 (ABC)
